THE SMALL THINGS

What would have happened if Sirius had never gone after Peter?

Prologue

It was a quiet night on October 31, 1981. A full moon drifted in the clear night sky, the temperatures had just started to take a turn for the chillier; and inside a little house on Keepsey Road in Godric's Hollow, a young father was playing with his little son while his wife tried to talk some sense into him.

At the same time, another young man was preparing to leave his tiny, cluttered Rogers Street flat in London. Nobody saw the tremble in his hands as he tucked his wand safely away, or the way his clear blue eyes darted all around, as if expecting monsters to jump from the closet. Nobody noticed when he rubbed his left wrist, as if a case of rheumatism had struck. And then he left.

Meanwhile, a third young man had kissed his girlfriend goodbye at the steps to her Egan Avenue boarding house in London, and was heading for the empty Rogers Street flat on his motorbike, worry in his eyes as he watched the full moon above him.

And as all of this was happening, a fourth young man was trapped in his personal hell, hidden away in a remote ramshackle property. Worry and pain and anger all melded together to create one of the most awful nights of his life, making him howl with frustration as he tried to break out of his secure shed.

It would be only a short time – not even two hours – before all seven lives were torn asunder. A family destroyed, a sacred brotherhood broken, and in the midst of it all, a child with nowhere to go.