Dawn Rivera

Shell Cottage

Bill and Fleur's cottage stands alone on a cliff overlooking the sea, its walls embedded with shells and whitewashed. It is a lonely and beautiful place. Wherever I go inside the tiny cottage or its garden, I can hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature. Harry and Danny spend much of the next few days making excuses to escape the crowded cottage.

The enormity of their decision not to race Voldemort to the wand still scares me. I can not remember, ever before, choosing not to act. I am full of doubts.

There are moments when I wonder whether it was outright madness not to try to prevent Voldemort breaking into the tomb. I can not explain satisfactorily why they decided against it: every time I try to reconstruct the internal arguments that led them to their decision, they sound feebler to me.

But Hermione and I support them. Now forced to accept that the Elder Wand is real, we maintain that it is an evil object, and that the way Voldemort took possession of it is repellent, not to be considered.

"You could never have done it, Harry, Danny," Hermione says again and again. "You couldn't have broken into Dumbledore's grave."

But the idea of Dumbledore's corpse frightens me much less than the possibility that I might have misunderstood the living Dumbledore's intentions. I feel I am still groping in the dark; I have chosen my path but keep looking back, wondering whether I have misread the signs, whether I should have taken the other way. From time to time, anger at Dumbledore crashes over me again, powerful as the waves slamming themselves against the cliff beneath the cottage, anger that Dumbledore did not explain before he died.

"But is he dead?" says Ron, three days after we have arrived at the cottage. Harry and Danny have been staring out over the wall that separates the cottage garden from the cliff when Ron, Hermione and I found them.

"Yes, he is, Ron, please don't start that again!" I say.

"Look at the facts, Dawn," says Ron, speaking across Harry and Danny, who continue to gaze at the horizon. "The silver doe. The sword. The eye Harry and Danny saw in the mirror - "

"Harry and Danny admit they could have imagined the eye!" Hermione says. "Don't you, Harry, Danny?"

"We could have," says Harry, without looking at us.

"But you don't think you did, do you?" asks Ron.

"No, we don't," says Danny.

"There you go!" says Ron quickly, before Hermione and I can carry on. "If it wasn't Dumbledore, explain how Dobby knew we were in the cellar, Hermione, Dawn?"

"We can't - but can you explain how Dumbledore sent him to us if he's lying in a tomb at Hogwarts?" I say.

"I dunno, it could've been his ghost!"

"Dumbledore wouldn't come back as a ghost," says Harry. "He would've gone on."

"What d'you mean, 'gone on'?" asks Ron, but before Harry and Danny can say any more, a voice behind us says, "'Arry?"

Fleur has come out of the cottage, her long, silver hair flying in the breeze.

"'Arry, Grip'ook would like to speak to you. E eez in ze smallest bedroom, 'e says 'e does not want to be over 'eard."

Her dislike of the goblin sending her to deliver messages is clear; she looks irritable as she walks back round the house.

Griphook is waiting for us, as Fleur said, in the tiniest of the cottage's three bedrooms, in which Hermione, Luna and I sleep by night. He has drawn the red cotton curtains against the bright, cloudy sky, which gives the room a fiery glow at odds with the rest of the airy, light cottage.