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It is with a queer sort of grace – so slow that he thinks he can catch it, yet quick enough that it is gone before he’s noticed – that the façade crumbles.

It is funny, he reflects bitterly, how the walls that seem to be the strongest can be poked aside like tissue paper in an instant. If any place was impenetrable it ought to have been the Ministry, with its solid walls and even more solid layers of protection spells. It should have been the last place to fall – the stronghold, the retreat, the place of refuge – and yet here it is, in shambles before anyone even knew the war had started.

Some people had known, he corrects himself automatically. Now that the façade has crumbled there is no purpose in attempting to rebuild it, even in his own thoughts. He can no longer recolor the facts to his own satisfaction, and Percy has always prided himself on exactness.

The trouble was that it had been so easy, so simple to set up a spectrum as harsh and unyielding as the black and white squares of the Ministry floor, a spectrum with only two categories – those who were working for the Ministry (for the country, for the people, for the sake of all that’s good) and those who were working against it.

All his life, Percy has built and gathered, painted and carved, and now everything is falling down around him.

There is a sound behind him and he turns to see Penelope, looking young and lost among the debris. He kisses her heedless of the people milling around him, his coworkers drowning in the shambles of their beliefs (though there is a twisted sort of satisfaction in the fact that they were all wrong together). He can feel her body pressing against his own, can feel himself flowing into her. He wonders vaguely if kissing is the purest form of Legilimency and if through the kiss they can become one body, one soul.

He holds her tight, but for the first time there is an element of fear in his embrace. He wonders now why he never feared before, but the walls he had built were strong, and the lies he told himself had seemed almost true. Now he sees clearly for the first time in years, and he is afraid that in the shambles of what was once the beautiful and imposing atrium, she will recoil upon seeing that he himself is not as black and white as he had pretended.

As a child Percy watched his parents, and it seemed to him that they moved in a world of brilliant lights and dark shadows. He imagined what it would be like to be an adult, and pictured a time when things would suddenly become clear – a world of black and white and inflexible lines that were firm and still.

The first time he realized that perhaps the world of adults was not as black and white and inexorable and comforting as he had thought was when he stood on the twisted stairs and watched his father weave a web of deceit for his Uncle Ignatius.

Uncle Ignatius was fat and jolly; he liked Percy best of all the children, and only last year had given him a rat to be his very own. Percy trusted him as completely as he trusted his own parents, but now he listened to his father speak quickly and nervously. “No, no,� his father said, “we’re making plans to go to Africa this summer – give the boys a new experience. Elphias Doge? We’ve been out of contact with him for years, I’m afraid. Pity to lose touch, he was a nice old man.�

Percy thought of friendly Mr. Doge, who had let all the boys try on his funny hat with the feather on the back, and stared at his father in disbelief.

“I had to do it, Molly,� his father said when Uncle Ignatius was gone. “I had no choice – we simply can’t trust him anymore.� His mother, her face red from tears, had nodded.

“Loss of innocence,� the adult Percy was to say. “Regrettable, but it really can’t be helped.� But that was later on, when he had forgotten more. At the time he was shocked, with a child’s horror. He thought of the sick-burning uncleanness of his own lies – “It was Fred, I saw him do it,� and “I already degnomed the garden, I did it yesterday.� Somehow he had always thought that once he grew up the world would be different – that lying and deception belonged to the domain of children and someday he would cross into a new world where choices would be simple and irrevocable.

That night he lay awake in bed and thought of grown-ups who lied and fought amongst each other for indiscernible reasons, and when he could not sleep for thinking of it he crept up the twisted stairs to Bill and Charlie’s room.

His parents had thought they were doing him a favor when they gave him a room to his own. “He’s different than the others,� they would say when they thought he couldn’t hear. Percy heard a lot of things he was not meant to, peering through horn-rimmed glasses into rooms he did not enter.

The twins eavesdropped openly and honestly, and did not care if anyone found them. They had nothing to prove; they were children and they were happy to be children. Percy listened in secret and in shame to the world he wanted so desperately to enter, sure that the very act of listening proved his own inadequacy.

That night, he wondered for the first time if grown-ups ever eavesdropped. Through the closed door he heard the even breathing of his brothers, who had no secrets to keep.

Charlie and Bill lived in an in-between world of golden days and peaceful nights. Though Bill was taller than his mother and Charlie’s voice was beginning to break, they still wrestled in the yard and chased each other around the kitchen table and unashamedly made themselves sick eating apples from the orchard at the bottom of the hill. Their mother fussed over them and chastised them for their greediness, and, “when will you ever learn?� she asked. Percy, watching Uncle Bilius refill his glass again and again, realized that perhaps some people never learn, and so he ate the apples and was sick in silence, ashamed of his own imperfection.

The year he turned eleven, he followed Bill down to the old orchard and watched him kiss a brown-haired girl under the gnarled apple tree. Their bodies were pressed close and Bill’s hands were in her hair; the sunlight dappled them dark and golden, mysterious and beautiful. When Bill came to dinner that night his face was smudged. There was a secret quivering at the corner of his lips, and Percy thought that this, perhaps, was how one became a grown up.

After that Bill was, quite suddenly, an adult. Percy could not have said how it happened, because the very next day Bill went with him and Charlie down to the orchard, where they lay on their backs and stuffed themselves with apples as the juice ran down their chins and dried, sticky, on their hands. Once Percy would have thought that this act of greed alone marked Bill as a child, but he had learned by now, and something that still lurked at the corner of Bill’s mouth, now sticky-sweet from too many apples, told him different.

It was five years before Percy kissed a girl, and when he did, he found himself reminded of the summer orchard and the sticky-sweetness of too many apples and, inexplicably, Bill’s hands caught up in masses of soft brown hair.

Penelope smelled of lavender and mint, and her hair was the color of honey. He closed his eyes, and imagined sunlight streaming through the branches of the apple tree. When they were finished they stepped back uncertainly, and Percy wondered if this was what it felt like to be an adult, these tentative movements, first towards people and then away.

Their kiss then was something new and unfamiliar and extraordinary, a shared moment in which they discovered each other. But she never really saw him, Percy realizes. He did not see himself until now, as the shambles of his life fall around him.

She is soft and sweet and honest as a child, and he wonders how she managed to escape the empty façade of the adult world. She is the realest person he has ever met, and he revels in her reality as he holds her close, her body so different – golden, dark, mysterious, beautiful – from his own.

Then she steps back, and he knows the moment of revelation has come.

Before he can stop himself and make a dignified retreat, reconstructing the shattered walls of his illusions, his mouth has betrayed him. “Please, Penelope, I’m sorry,� he begs. “We were wrong. I was wrong. �

There are thousands of words waiting to spill out of his mouth and rebuild their fantasies, in a vain attempt to pretend that nothing has changed and that he can still win her back, but then she smiles. Her smile is the same as it has always been, sweet and loving, and that silences him more effectively than any words could have done.

“I know,� she says.

“But-� he begins, though he does not know why he is turning on himself to convince her of the mixed up mess of light and shadow which he has become.

“I know,� she says again, and then she kisses him.

Perhaps this is what it means to be an adult, this uncertainty and acceptance, regret and understanding. It is not, then, a black and white world, but neither is it inexorable. “Let’s go home,� Penelope says, and the taste of forgiveness is apple-sweet upon his lips.