James kissed her back, one hand rising to tangle in her hair as his other arm went around her waist. "Told you so," he murmured against her mouth, amused.
Someone like Lestrange could probably argue that he'd implanted a fake memory rather than bringing back a real one, but there was far too much detail in real memories for them to ever be mistaken. All the details that the Lestranges couldn't ever have hoped to account for, when they'd told Lily the story of her supposed wedding to Sirius. All the little moments, the looks exchanged, the emotions associated with it that were still embedded deep in her heart. That could never, ever be faked. And even details like the song had bled through. He smiled, brushing a lock of hair off her cheek. "Well, you did give me the record for Christmas," he said. "Was that your way of telling me?"
That was the funny thing about memory. There was so much in the years that she'd forgotten that a few things were bound to bleed through, small things. And of course, they had only tampered with her mind. None of them had ever been truly erased, not from her heart. Still, it felt undeniably good to be remembered by her mind as well.
... Until she realized the part of it that was missing, one of the few things that he had been keeping from her. He hadn't been able to tell her the first time it had come up, because she hadn't trusted him then, and he hadn't been able to bear the idea of her accusing him of hurting her parents. More than that, he hadn't been in a position to comfort her when the news inevitably made her sad. After that, he simply hadn't had the opportunity, and hadn't wanted to make one. She'd been in pain for so long, and she'd been trying to process it one step at a time; he hadn't wanted to overwhelm her. The time seemed to have come to deliver the bad news, though.
He ran his thumb along her jawline as he looked at her, just as beautiful as the day he'd married her. "I'm sure your father would have walked you down the aisle if he could have," he said, eyes sad. "But he couldn't. He died in our seventh year, love." It was awful, that she'd been forced to forget that; hard enough to deal with having forgotten people that she could regain, but she would never make new memories with her parents. Unless they showed up here, which he supposed was possible. "I'm sorry, Lily."