• Ginny and Harry move in together as soon as they graduate. They’ve waited long enough, and they’ve been through more than most adults, so they’re ready, right?
• Wrong. Now that Harry is not actively trying to stop the most evil wizard of all time it becomes clear that he is really not okay. He has, understandably, suffered a serious amount of trauma and between the nightmares and the flashbacks and the panic attacks there’s not much room for learning how to share a life with somebody else.
• And there’s not much room for Ginny’s own trauma, or her grief over losing Fred—not because Harry isn’t trying to support her, but because he has a hard time just taking care of himself, and Ginny is her mother’s daughter, after all, and doesn’t know how to be there for Harry without making endless cups of tea and soothing him through two a.m. fits of sobbing and generally pushing down her own needs and sometimes she stares at the ceiling in the dark and feels like the walls are closing in.
• The first time a Quidditch scout tries to recruit her she says no. And the second time, and the third. But then this woman who looks like she could legitimately take down a hippogriff offers her a place on the Holyhead Harpies, the all-women’s team Ginny has followed since she was old enough to lisp the word “Quaffle,” and she says yes.
• “We need a break,” she says to Harry. “You need to go to therapy. I need to go to therapy. I need to be somewhere that won’t remind me every day of what I’ve lost. I love you, but I have to go.” Because tough love, right? She doesn’t tell him her heart is breaking. But she also doesn’t tell him that walking out lifts a weight from her shoulders so heavy she can’t believe she was still standing under it.
• Her father takes the train with her to Wales and speaks solemnly with the bemused ticket-taker about how the wheels go and when he hugs her goodbye he pulls her close and tells her he’s proud of her for doing what she needs to do.
• The Harpies practice on a pitch overlooking the Irish Sea. The air is cold and the sky is impossibly blue and when Ginny gets on her broom, the rest of the world disappears.
• Her teammates are a bunch of incredible women with impressive muscles and asymmetrical haircuts and mouths like sailors and it only takes Ginny a couple of weeks to go from intimidated to infatuated to one of the gang. Home, she thinks one evening as they all sit on a cliff above the sea, watching a meteor shower, and she only feels a little bit guilty that the word is a better fit for here than it ever was for little flat she shared with Harry.
• Ginny cuts her hair short and is pretty sure she knows what message she’s sending there. Sure enough, it’s not long after that one of her teammates, a statuesque Keeper with a pierced nose and a lethal swing, corners her in a pub bathroom and for the first time in her life Ginny has her hand up a woman’s shirt.
• It’s good. She likes it. She likes it…a lot.
• Dating is not really her game right now, which suits her just fine. There are a lot of women interested in foulmouthed red-haired Chasers in and around the Harpies’ sphere so she’s hardly pressed for choice. It’s not the first time she’s developed a reputation, but she prefers the admiring smirks of her teammates to the judgmental whispers that followed her around Hogwarts when she went from dating Michael Corner to Dean Thomas to Harry Potter in the space of a year or so. Nobody calls her names here.
• It’s been nearly six months before she realizes that none of them know who she is. They were all fighting their own battles in Wales during the war—a tense standoff with a community of giants unfolded in the hills nearby—so they didn’t place her as Harry Potter’s best friend’s sister, or as Harry Potter’s ex-girlfriend. Her teammate nearly spits out her beer when Ginny mentions, casually, the time Harry kissed her for the first time after a victorious Quidditch match.
• “HARRY FREAKING POTTER,” she squawks, and for a sinking second Ginny thinks the honeymoon is over—she’ll be that girl now, famous and broken—but her teammates just tell her if she ever wants to talk, they’re here, and then go about treating her exactly the same as before (except for the occasional furtive question about Harry’s skills as Seeker. “Did he really swallow the Snitch?” someone asks).
• Of course Ginny’s still grieving, and she still has days she can’t get out of bed. But she feels like she’s at least moving towards healing. She talks to the team’s psychologist and starts writing to Neville, sometimes, when she needs to reach out to someone else who lived through that terrifying year of the Hogwarts resistance. On the two-year anniversary of Fred’s death she has a Quidditch match, and her whole family comes up to watch, and they go out to dinner afterwards and laugh and cry and reminisce late into the night.
• She talks to Harry, eventually. He’s moved in with Ron and Hermione and although there are still shadows under his eyes, he’s put on some much-needed weight and he talks about his Auror training like he really cares, like it’s given him a reason to get up in the morning.
• “I get it now,” he says. “Why you had to leave.”
• She hugs him goodbye. There’s no spark between them anymore. No trace of that sharp wanting pull she used to feel when she was near him. She thinks that’s probably okay.
• Back in Holyhead, on the Quidditch pitch, high above the gleaming dark sea, she dips and swerves and darts through the air: sun on the water, the wind at her back.

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless - Donna Tartt