"But you´re not imagining things?" Draco finished for her.

"I don´t think I am," she said.

"You´re not," he said quietly.

She looked at him, and bit her lip. She knew he meant it. He didn´t lie.

"What is it?" she said in a tiny voice. "Is there somebody else?"

Draco said, "I don´t know. I doubt it."

"Then what?" Her voice cracked. "Can´t you ask him?"

Draco looked down at his hands, and then up at her, and she read the reply in his face. The odd sympathy of thought and feeling that had tied them together the summer remained with them, although it was harder to call up than it had been. She knew what he was feeling — desire to do this for her, the wish that she not be unhappy, the fear that whatever the answer was, it would hurt her, and the knowledge that however much she wanted it, he could no more extract information from an unsuspecting Harry only to betray that information to her than he could fly without a broomstick.

It was more complicated being Draco, she reflected, than he was often given credit for.

"I´m sorry," she said. "I shouldn´t have asked."

"He loves you," said Draco. The look in his eyes was distant. The dark green of his Quidditch robes should have made him look sallow, but it didn´t. It brought out the winter pallor of his skin, his eyelashes so black against it, eyes as clear and gray as mirrors. He looked like an angel, she thought, although one of the heavenly kind or one of the fallen sort, it was hard to be sure.

She remembered him at the Manor, reaching around her throat to fasten her necklace. I waited so long to hear you say that…if things were different…

She shook her head to clear it. She was thinking these thoughts because she was unhappy and because Harry seemed as cold and as remote from her these days as a Durmstrang glacier. "How do you know?" she asked.