"Mother of All Secrets"

By: Catnip2

This wasn't the first time Molly Weasley had found herself lonely. Since her youngest child had started Hogwarts so many years before, Molly found herself absent of all companionship rather often. Sometimes the feeling of loneliness would set in while she washed the dishes, or while she made supper for her husband who had not yet returned home from work. She would turn on Wizard wireless, or have a glass of firewhiskey no one knew she kept, and the nagging feeling would leave her.

On this warm spring day the feeling came just as she finished de-gnoming her garden, and was added to by an owl from her husband, stating her would be late for dinner. He always insisted she start without him, but she never did. It had nothing to do with how kind a wife she was, she just didn't want to eat alone. Sitting alone at a table had always reminded Molly of her mother, and the loneliness that had felt together.

Molly's mother was the youngest of her generation in the pureblood Prewett family. Like the Weasleys, the Prewetts were full of red hair, but somehow Molly's mother seemed to be lacking the fiery disposition that usually went with the trait. Molly remembered the woman, who had passed on a decade or so ago, as a generally melancholy woman with few interests and no friends. Her mother had always seemed to lack the spirit for life necessary for motherhood, and until Molly had gone to Hogwarts, her life had been very gray indeed.

Arthur had changed all that for her. He had filled her life with color and wonderment. She was thankful everyday he had wanted her to love, to live with, and to mother his children.

Molly as a child had always assumed her mother's grave unhappiness was due to the absence of Molly's father, who for some reason Molly had never met. Her family had come up with a hundred reasons to explain Molly's lack of a father figure. He had died, or run off, or had already been married. In her childish loneliness Molly had tried to imagine her father. Tall and dashing, frozen in a stone by some scheming witch, just like Merlin.

Now a shiver ran up her spine at the thought of him.

Walking into the kitchen and washing her hands, Molly noticed a picture of her children on the windowsill above the sink. It had been an attempt at a nice photograph of all of them, but Fred and George had seen to making it otherwise. Molly smiled and held the picture in her hands.

Until her mother had died, there had been so many things Molly had hidden from her children. There were so many things she thought it'd be best they didn't know. But then her mother died, and Molly received a letter her mother had written shortly before her death.

Now, there was nothing in the world Molly wouldn't tell her children.

The letter had been her mother's confessional. A list of things never spoken. It contained the story of Molly's father. How her mother had met him in school and fallen in love, how he didn't know her mother existed. Molly's mother wrote of a chance encounter with him in Diagon Alley after they had left Hogwarts. How her mother had seized a chance and ended up on her back in a room above the Leaky Cauldron. How her father had never been seen again.

Placing the photograph back on the window sill, Molly noticed a small garden snake had come through the kitchen door that Molly had kept open for the breeze. She frowned at it as it went about, unaware of her.

"OUT!" she yelled. The snake turned to her, made a displeased noise, and slithered back out the door.

Molly sighed sadly and looked back at the photograph.

Maybe there was something she wouldn't tell them.