Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
If someone had asked Melissa Carhartt to define her life in one word, she would have answered sad. And she would not have been wrong.
Even her death felt fittingly sad. She lay prostrate in a narrow hospital bed at the age of twenty-seven, and there was something almost inevitable about it — as though her life had always been building toward exactly this: a small room, a dimming light, and nobody waiting outside the door.
Her father had vanished from her world when she was too young to form more than blurred impressions of him. Her mother had drifted in and out of hospitals for as long as Melissa could remember, until illness finally claimed her when Melissa was barely nineteen. There were no siblings. No extended family. No friends who stayed.
Even love had betrayed her.
At sixteen she had met the boy she believed would save her. Looking back, the warning signs had been there from the beginning — small, subtle fractures she had chosen not to see. But she had been starving for affection, for stability, for something that resembled a family, and he had offered just enough of an illusion to make her believe. The abuse had begun as it so often does, disguised as care. Concern became control. Protection became possession. Slowly, methodically, he had isolated her from the fragile pieces of identity she had left. By the time she finally walked away — ten years later — she was little more than a hollowed version of herself.
It had taken the first time he raised his hand against her for something inside her to break in the right direction.
Leaving had cost her everything. She sometimes wondered, in her darker moments, whether the effort of it — of clawing herself free — had drained the last reserves of her strength and made room for the sickness that followed. The doctors would never say so, of course. But she felt it in her bones. The illness progressed quickly. That, at least, was a quiet, morbid comfort. She would not spend a decade fading in sterile rooms the way her mother had.
Would her mother be waiting for her?
It would not be long now. She could feel it — her strength ebbing like water slipping through open fingers. The white antiseptic room blurred at its edges, dimming as though someone were slowly turning down the light of the world.
She tried to remember if she had ever truly been happy.
Yes. There had been dreams, once. She had wanted to become a doctor. She had wanted a large, noisy family — siblings, children, a father at the head of the table who stayed. In the lonely nights when her mother had been hospitalised, she used to imagine that if she'd had more people around her — more love — everything would have been different. She would have been different. She would have been whole.
Instead, she had escaped into other worlds.
The only constant companion she had ever truly known had been the Harry Potter books. From the time her mother first read them aloud to her at four years old, their pages had been her refuge. Hogwarts had been warmer than any home she had known. Its characters more faithful than the people in her life. She had grown up inside those stories the way other children grew up inside families, and she had never entirely left.
Now, as she hovered at the threshold, those stories remained.
The world was fading.
Perhaps her heaven would look like Hogwarts. She had always thought it would.
If only she had been given more time — time to build the family she had always longed for. Then she would not be dying alone.
With that final, fragile thought, Melissa Carhartt slipped away from the world. Quietly, and as she had always lived... alone.
***
Being dead was nothing like she had imagined.
She had pictured darkness, or warmth, or perhaps a meadow stretching endlessly under a golden sky. Not this.
She lay on what she assumed was the floor, though it was impossible to tell where the floor ended and everything else began. All of it was white — not the cold, institutional white of a hospital, but something vaster and more absolute. The white of pure absence. It pressed against her from every direction without weight or temperature, and it went on forever, and she was lying in the middle of it.
She pushed herself upright experimentally. She felt solid. She looked down at herself and blinked. Her hands were steady. Her arms were full. No sunken cheeks, no bruised veins, no brittle limbs worn thin by disease. Her body was whole — young and strong as it hadn't been for a long time. She lifted a hand to her hair and felt long sandy-blonde waves cascade over her shoulders. She had missed it. She hadn't realised, until now, how much.
She also noticed, belatedly, that she was entirely naked. Before embarrassment could fully form, warmth brushed against her skin and a flowing golden robe shimmered into existence, fabric settling around her as though it had always been there, waiting.
"Huh," she said. "Interesting."
She touched her hair again, almost reverently.
"You do have beautiful hair," said a quiet voice behind her. "I always wished mine had been that pretty."
Melissa turned sharply. A girl sat a short distance away on a white bench that either had not been there a moment ago, or had been there all along and she had simply failed to see it. The bench appeared to be carved from the same seamless brightness as everything else. The girl wore simple white robes — plain, almost austere — and she was young, no more than twenty, with dark hair hanging limp around a narrow face. Her eyes were not quite aligned, lending her expression a faintly scattered quality, as though she were looking at two things at once.
For one irrational moment Melissa thought of horror films; of pale figures in empty rooms. But this girl did not look menacing. She looked tired, as if she had been waiting for a very long time and had made her peace with it.
"Are you dead too?" Melissa asked, stepping closer.
The girl tilted her head slightly. "I think so. Time moves strangely here. Or perhaps it doesn't move at all." A pause. "I believe I'm waiting."
"For what?" Melissa began —
A faint cry interrupted her; thin and fragile. The unmistakable sound of a newborn, echoing across the white expanse as though carried from an immeasurable distance. It tugged at something in Melissa's chest before she had time to understand what. The girl closed her eyes. When she opened them the grief was still there, but further back. "Will you keep me company for a while?" she asked. "It has been lonely."
Melissa hesitated only a moment before sitting beside her. The bench felt cool and solid beneath her.
"I don't think I have anywhere else to be," she said.
The girl stared out into the brightness.
"What's your name?" Melissa asked.
A long silence. It made her wonder if she had misstepped with the question.
"It has been a long time since anyone asked," the girl said at last, as though pulling the answer from somewhere far away. "It used to be Merope."
The name landed between them like a stone into still water.
"Merope," Melissa repeated carefully.
The infant's cry came again. Closer now, or perhaps more insistent. The girl's fingers tightened around the edge of the bench.
"I was not very good at living," she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact rather than self-pitying, which made it somehow worse. "I thought love could be forced. I thought it could fill emptiness."
Melissa looked at her. "What happened?"
"I made someone love me who did not choose to." A pause. "When I stopped — when I could not bear it any longer — he left. I had nothing. I had nowhere." Her voice did not waver. That was the worst of it. "So I let go."
The cry came again. Melissa's throat tightened. Something was assembling itself at the back of her mind — pieces clicking into place slowly, the way a memory surfaces not all at once but in fragments.
Merope. A love potion. A husband who left. A baby.
"Merope," she said slowly. "What was your surname?"
The girl turned to look at her fully for the first time. There was no pride in her expression, and no evasion. Only a fragile, naked honesty.
"Gaunt," she said. "My name was Merope Gaunt."
The white expanse seemed to hum. The pieces snapped together all at once. Melissa's thoughts scattered and reformed in rapid, lurching succession. The Gaunts. The shack in Little Hangleton. The potion. Tom Riddle. The orphanage. The boy who would become—
The cry came again — sharper now, urgent.
"That's your baby," Melissa breathed.
Merope's lips trembled, very slightly. "Yes."
Silence.
"I could not stay," Merope said. There was no excuse in her tone. Only simple, exhausted truth. "I was too empty. I did not know how to be enough."
Melissa looked at her — really looked at her. This was not a villain. This was a girl who had never been shown how to be loved and had consequently never learned how to give it. A girl who had run out of road. The cry came again. Stronger.
Something tightened in Melissa's chest and pulled. Merope turned toward her. "When you arrived," she said, "I felt it. You are not from my world."
"No," Melissa said quietly.
"You know it, though." It was not a question. "You know who I am."
"Yes."
Merope studied her — the golden robe, the steady posture, the hands that were not shaking. "You have known pain," she said. "But you did not break the way I did."
The words were not accusatory. If anything, they were wondering.
"I came close," Melissa said.
"But you did not." Merope's eyes were very still. "You are sturdier than you think."
The light shifted, barely perceptibly, but enough. The cry that followed was no longer distant.
"I think," Merope whispered, "that he is calling for someone."
Melissa's throat was tight. "What are you asking me?"
Merope's hand moved hesitantly toward hers — as though she was not sure she had the right, as though she had spent so long having nothing that the act of asking for something had become almost physically difficult.
When their fingers touched, the world fractured. Memories poured through her in a torrent — damp air and decay, a father's voice raised in fury, a brother's laughter with a cruel edge, the dizzying vertigo of desire and desperation, a man's face softening against his will, brief and terrible bliss, then abandonment, cold floors, hunger, shame. And beneath all of it, woven through every fragment like a thread — the particular, animal love of a woman for the child growing inside her. Fierce and clumsy and entirely without outlet.
The visions receded. Merope's grip trembled.
"Will you stay?" she asked.
It was not a command. It wasn't bargain either. A plea from someone who had never before believed she was allowed to make one. Melissa thought of a hospital room and nobody outside the door. She thought of wanting a family. She thought of a boy who did not have to become what he became — who had never been given the chance not to.
The cry came again, and this time it went straight through her like a key turning in a lock she had not known was there.
"I don't know how to be a mother," she said.
Merope gave the smallest, saddest smile. "Neither did I."
The light intensified, spilling across the floor, the bench, their joined hands.
"But you will try," Merope said.
It was not a question. Melissa closed her eyes.
"Yes."
The white exploded into brilliance. The cry became a scream — real and close and full of need.
Pain slammed into her like gravity returning all at once. Air burned into her lungs. Voices shouted across one another somewhere above her.
"She's breathing—!"
"We thought she'd gone—"
Melissa's eyes flew open to cracked plaster and dim lamplight. A matron hovered above her, pale and shaken. Beside her, swaddled and furious, a newborn wailed with startling, healthy force. Merope Gaunt gasped for air.
And this time —
She did not let go.