Druella had always thought that her eldest daughter, Bellatrix, didn't know her arse from her elbow—in other words, she was far too naïve and green.

Obviously, in families as proud, unquestioning obedience to parental will was considered a near-sacred duty. And there was nothing surprising in this. It had always been like that. And so it was with Druella, who'd had to boil in that same pot of tradition. And yet, none of that changed the wordless but burning fact, something that was not spoken of aloud in the houses hung with ancestral tapestries stretching back into hoary antiquity: Bella was in love.

You.

You were a half-blood, and that alone made her feelings impossible in the eyes of the family. But it was not only a matter of blood. The very essence of this affection, its direction, undermined the fabric of existence upon which their entire foundation rested. But Bellatrix wanted you. She was deaf to reason, blind to danger, unwilling to acknowledge your origin, that you were a girl, or that all her love was forbidden by a multitude of invisible but binding laws.

But has the heart ever known what it is permitted to do?

So, where did it all lead?

Summer came lazily that year, with the cloying scent of roses and a languid heat that faded the lace at the drawing room windows. Neither of you was in any hurry to grow up—or at least, you pretended not to be. The world still allowed the two of you to hide beneath its canopy, as though it still belonged to you and Bella, as it had in childhood. Bellatrix came to your family estate. But behind her usual, undisguised confidence, there was something foreign. It became clear then: it was anxiety.

All day long, your heart was torn with questions and premonitions.

When your parents retired for the night, you called her into the living room under the pretence of reading by the fireplace. But all she did was pace from the window to the hearth, searching in vain for an exit from a prison she hadn't at first recognised. Her fingers toyed with the embroidery at the hem of her nightdress; her uncertain gaze flickered about, for the first time stripped of its usual arrogance.

And finally, she knelt before you. Her eyes were full of tears, though she wasn't crying, or perhaps she had already wiped them away with her sleeve. After all, she had always been thought of as the stone lady. And all you could do was thread your fingers through her soft, unbound curls and wait.

"After graduating from the Academy… I have to marry Rodolphus." Her words fell into the silence like nails into a coffin—probably yours. They were spoken casually, as if announcing something utterly inevitable. The mind still refused to accept them, but the heart had already clenched in a sickening, almost sweet spasm of jealousy.

Ah, jealousy. How bittersweet its taste, when youth has not yet been marked by time, and the heart still believes loss to be a calamity of the first order. When every smile bestowed elsewhere wounds. You were jealous of his name, of its sound, of its presence, of the mere fact that he existed. You begrudged the future in which he would be written beside her, bound to her in ink.

You longed to cry out, to grasp her shoulders and shake the truth back into her: that she was yours, even if only within these four walls.

But what, in truth, could you have done against the will of the parents?

Such was the fate of girls who were not permitted to love.

You held her as she trembled and thought: how oddly beautiful she was then, in her brokenness. And obviously, you wished that the world were otherwise. That Bella might, for once, simply be Bella—yours and no one else's.

But you both knew: when the final term was over, she would leave. She would enter a world that accepted her only as a wife, only as a mother, only as a husband's ornament, but never as the one who had once, for one summer, belonged to you.

"I hate him," she sobbed. "Let's run away?" Bella sprang to her feet, hastily wiping her reddened, milk-pale cheeks with trembling palms, and turned away.

"Ridiculous…"