"They were the bearers of glamorous names that weighed upon them like physical infirmities. They appeared stunted and immature, although their eyes were old. Already as young children they were versed in irony. Rarely were they surprised by cruelty, including their own, but they could be moved to helpless tears by simple acts of kindness, generosity."

Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde.

"My parents' marriage was one of convenience. That is not to say that they were not fond of each other, but they were under no illusions that they had been brought together by passion. He was already old when they got married, and much older than she was. He recognized this as his last chance to preserve the Nott line. She was intelligent and plain, and therefore repeatedly passed over for marriage proposals by younger, more eligible pure-bloods. And a pure-blood her husband would have to be: her parents would not consent to anything less. When the first blush of her youth had faded and all her friends had married and begun having children and she had almost given up hope, my father started showing her attention. He did this shyly at first, afraid that she was embarrassed by his affections but too polite to tell him so, but when it became clear that not only she but her entire family were delighted, he was emboldened, and finally he proposed to her.

"My mother was killed by Aurors before the Dark Lord's first fall. Though her politics were almost as rigid as my father's, she was not a Death Eater. On the night of her death my father was away; she was alone in the house with me. I like to picture her wandering around our crumbling manor (but she wouldn't have let it reach the state of dilapidation my father would later let it get to, not her) with me on her hip, listening to the wind. But you of all people must know what it's like, scanning back through the darkest recesses of memory, trying to dredge up a picture of someone who died before you could even talk. I imagine her holding me, singing to me, folding me into the soft-smelling blankets of my cot. And then… some curse-happy Auror itching to kill, desperate to even out the tally of losses burst in.

"Sorry, I didn't mean… I'm sure you're much too professional for that. But nobody really knows what happened that night. The Aurors in question swore blind that they had acted exactly as the information they had received dictated. It was partly this confusion that allowed my father, one of the oldest and first Death Eaters, to escape punishment. This was aided by the sympathy people felt for him over his wife's death, and for the infant son she left behind. Later, much later, I looked up the transcripts of my father's trial, and as far as I can tell, he pinned as many of his crimes as he could on other people and mentioned me and my mother at every opportunity.

"Were we close, my father and I? Well, we the only family left to one another. We had similar tastes, I suppose, and we would often sit reading together on the threadbare sofas of the drawing room, but I never really understood what animated him, what made him devote himself so unreservedly to the Dark Lord. And yet…you would understand, wouldn't you, if I said I loved my father because he was my father. As though my affection for him was no more than filial obligation. But it wasn't that. I didn't just love my father. I liked him too. And I wanted him to like me. He was clever and cynical, qualities I admired and tried to foster within myself. Maybe I succeeded in creating this impression among my peers, but my father did not treat me with the seriousness I craved; he simply indulged me as one would any precocious child.

"But after the fourth year at Hogwarts, nothing was the same. You emerged from the Triwizard maze with Cedric Diggory's dead body claiming to have witnessed the Dark Lord's return, and while most people refused to believe him simply out of fear, I knew it was true. Unlike many Death Eaters my father had not believed the Dark Lord to be dead, but had assumed that the Dark Lord's return to power would not take place within his lifetime. But that evening I knew that everything had changed: the Dark Lord had ceased to be a spectre.

"I won't say that his return showed a side of my father that had previously been hidden, more that it drew out a strain of cruelty of which I had already been aware, but had not had cause to ponder in great depth. I knew my father had been a Death Eater. I knew that the Death Eaters had murdered, blackmailed, tortured. If my father had hastened the deaths of a few Muggles and blood traitors, I did not care. They were nameless, faceless, hypothetical. Of course blood must be shed to uphold the purity of wizarding lineage. That's just how it works. Concede this, and you have to acknowledge that someone must do the shedding. So yes, if not the full details, I did know the essence of my father's involvement with the Death Eaters, and I accepted it.

"When I came home for the holidays, my father seemed extremely agitated. He had been, after all, one of the longest serving Death Eaters to avoid Azkaban and I wondered whether the Dark Lord had forgiven him, or was making him do some form of penance. My father would often go out without telling me where he was going, sometimes for days on end. This was fine by me as long as he left an adequate supply of reading material and Floo powder. I would go to London on my own sometimes, more to break the routine of home life than for any specific purpose, where I would wander up and down the bustling shop fronts of Diagon Alley. Eating a pumpkin butterscotch sundae outside Florean Fortescue's and watching the relaxed, unconcerned faces of shoppers strolling past, it felt as though I was the only one who knew our world was different. But while the Daily Prophet did what it could to blacken your name and dismiss your account as lunacy or lies, the Dark Lord silently gathered an army."

Nott lapses into silence for a moment. His gaze is unblinking, unnerving, although he seems reluctant to look directly at me. Instead, his eyes travel around my office, taking in the scattered heaps of files from the Auror Office, the bin overflowing with Chocolate Frog wrappers and plastic coffee cups, the framed photograph of Ginny trying to hold a hyperactive eighteen-month-old James. He seems particularly struck by this reminder of domesticity amid the piled evidence of my busy work life, but whether his reaction is one of envy or simple curiosity, I can't tell. I know that his life has been an exceptionally lonely one; that is how he has ended up coming to me, after all. He said, when he came in, that he had not slept in days, which I believe, looking at the rings under his pink-rimmed eyes. He looks a lot older than twenty five, although the uncertainty and self-consciousness of his manner reminds me of a shy teenager. He seems both restless and weary; I can imagine him pacing some rundown bedsit in north London through the night, thinking. Because he knows the potential consequences of his being here as well as I do. He seems freed by what he's already told me, happier, lighter, and yet he must know that my job is to collect evidence, not offer absolution. Even though he's already given me enough to start the procedure for a criminal trial before the Wizengamot, I let him keep talking.