The room wasn't empty, but it was thinning out. Pansy had taken up her usual position on the velvet chaise, cross-legged in one of Draco's old Quidditch jumpers — the one she'd stolen two years ago and never given back — with her phone face-down on her knee, like she was waiting for it to do something. Astoria lay stretched across the other end of the sofa with her head on a cushion and her heels still on, scrolling. Marianna was winding down beside the fireplace, one shoe dangling off her foot, still mid-conversation with Daphne about some fourth-year's birthday party in Hogsmeade that had apparently been a disaster.

And in the good corner armchair — the one by the fire, the one that was always taken by whoever got there first — Theodore Nott was reading.

He'd been reading for forty minutes. The same page. To be fair, the Ancient Runes translation was dry enough to kill a person, but that wasn't the reason his eyes kept drifting up from it.

A key turned in the iron lock of the common room entrance.

The door swung open, and for a second the corridor light bled through — cold and stark against all that green velvet. Then it shut, and Pansy's posture changed by a single degree. Small. Not enough that anyone who didn't share her face would have noticed.