Pansy sighed again. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ she admitted. She decided she must still be emotional from the trials of the day before because she felt like crying. ‘But how do you tell someone you don’t want to be with him when he’s spent the last ten years pretending to be someone that he’s not, pretending to be someone of ridicule so that he could be in places to hear things that might help end the war? And when you’re the only person in the world who knows the real person inside? And you’re having the child he never thought he’d have?’
She turned her head to rub her eyes against his shirt. ‘I’d already hurt him by refusing to marry him, but I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t marry him, too. Maybe I was hoping he’d find out about you and Higgs and leave me….’ She closed her eyes because it was such a cowardly way to handle it, but she couldn’t have told anyone because it would have put Gilderoy in danger. In more ways than one because if Theo or Draco had figured out how unhappy she was, they’d have probably gotten rid of him just to help her out.
Merlin, how had she gotten herself into such a messed up situation????
Frowning, Pansy said, ‘Cass, can I ask you a question?’ She knew Harry was a good man. She’d lived with him long enough to know that, and she had seen his ability to love and care for someone else in his relationship with Polly.
But Gilderoy had been a good man, too, even though most people didn’t know that. And he’d had a big heart. He’d loved her with every bit of it.
But he’d had such a big need, such a huge hole in his life to fill, and she had folded under the pressure of it. She’d been his family and the mother of his child, yes, but she’d also been his only friend and his only real confidant. She’d been the only one with whom he could be himself, and after over ten years alone, he’d had such a desperate need that she’d been smothered by it. She couldn’t go through that again.
‘Do you think I’m making another horrible mistake?’ she whispered.