The next day, Elijah dressed for work hurriedly, determined to catch Mister Blotts before his shift started. He was resolute in his desire to learn more about Gilderoy Lockhart and this mystery wench that had put the poor sot through the ringer.

Relieved to find his employer already in his office, Elijah knocked on the door, entering when he was summoned. Blotts was firmly entrenched in mountains of paperwork, which made Elijah feel slightly sheepish for complaining about the pile he had had to sort out, a fraction of what Mister Blotts was facing.

When he realized that his visitor was his young shop boy, Blotts cleaned his glasses with his sleeve and smiled at his employee. “So, Mister Macmillan, what can I do for you?”

His eyes meeting the older man’s, Elijah forged ahead. “Mister Blotts, whatever happened to Gilderoy Lockhart?”

“Ha!” Blott scoffed. “That nutter has been locked up in St. Mungo’s since 1992! He had an accident whilst he was working at Hogwarts, and it completely scrambled his wits.”

Elijah felt his heart sink. First, the poor man had his heart shattered to pieces, and then his mind went straight after. No one deserved that sort of rotten luck, not even someone like Lockhart. Shrugging nonchalantly, Elijah nodded his head, saying, “Thank you, sir. I was just wondering…there’s that old manuscript in the storage locker. Just wanted to know where I should put it.”

Blotts narrowed his eyes. “You mean that chapter I took out of Year with the Yeti?” When Elijah nodded, he continued. “I took that out because I don’t believe it ever happened.”

It was Elijah’s turn to emit a derisive laugh. “But none of those things actually happened to him! He was a right old fraud, and it’s unbelievable that you wouldn’t realize that.”

Blotts’ face lit with a conspiratorial smile. “But someone did those things.” Turning his attention back to his work, Blotts casually added, “Besides, it’s not like anyone would notice.”

As he left his boss to his work, Elijah grinned in a way that said that he knew something that others did not. Only a precious few people knew of that secret side of Gilderoy Lockhart, and it made him feel privileged to be one of them.

Once his day was over, Elijah decided to send an owl. He was vainly hoping that he could reach Sahira, at least just to make sure that she knew of Lockhart’s mental illness. If she had cared about him at all, she would want to at least know, even if she had no desire to visit.

Penning the letter proved to be difficult. No matter what he wrote, it sounded as if he were intruding in on something he ought not to know about. He did not want to put off the woman by sounding like a stalker or as if he were privy to too many extremely personal details. Finally, he settled on a rather innocuous message and sent his owl, Percival, to the Himalayas in search of a woman he was not even entirely sure existed.

After three days, Percival returned with a message tied to his leg; to Elijah’s relief, it was not the same one he sent. This one was addressed to him in a neat, feminine hand.

Dear Mister Macmillan,

Thank you for your information, but I’m sorry to say that you were a little too late. Sahira, the person to whom this letter was addressed, was my mother; she died last spring of pneumonia. She had been getting on in years, and her body just finally gave up on her, I suppose.

It saddens me to hear about Lockhart. She told me about him a few times. You see, he was my father, but Mum never got the courage to tell him about me, because, while she cared for him deeply, she didn’t think his adventurous spirit deserved to be trapped by a child he had not asked for.

I used to be bitter about it, but, after reading some of my father’s books, I realized that she was probably doing the right thing. He didn’t seem like the type to be tied down to one place, and I respect that. I only wish that he had gotten a chance to live his life instead of spending it in a hospital.

Again, thank you for your correspondence and best wishes,

Asha Lockhart

Elijah was gobsmacked, to say the least. He finally understood why Sahira had done as she did. When she realized that she was pregnant (in the wizarding world, of course, it was possible to tell as soon as the next day), she had started to alienate him in an effort to turn his attention away from her. What Sahira had intended to do by breaking Lockhart’s heart was to set him free - it had to have been one of the most painful things she had done.

There was still the matter of Lockhart not knowing he had a daughter. Elijah knew, in his mind, that he could never let that stand, so he decided to go the next day to visit the man.

When he arrived in St. Mungo’s, Elijah swallowed hard to dispel his irrational dislike for anything related to a hospital. It was a phobia he had carried since childhood, but he knew that needed to endure the discomfort for just that one day�”for Lockhart’s sake. He drew a deep breath in an attempt to calm his raging nerves and approached the friendly looking witch in bright green robes at the front desk.

“Can I help you, young man?” inquired said witch.

Elijah’s mind moved like lightning. There was not much of a chance of someone that was not a relative being able to see a patient, so he lied through his teeth. “I’m here to see my uncle.”

“Name?” she asked, as she withdrew a visitors’ badge from the desk.

“Gilderoy Lockhart.”

All the conversations that had been going on between the staff stopped abruptly as they stared at him. Elijah shifted uncomfortably under the intense scrutiny, but there had to be some reason for this reaction, and he wanted to know what it was. “Is there a problem?”

The desk witch seemed to shake off her momentary stupor and stammered, “Oh, no, well, it’s just that…well, you see, young man, your uncle is not doing so well right now.”

”Oh.” Elijah had not counted on that. Lockhart would be in his mid to late sixties, which was not old at all for a wizard, but he probably should have taken into account the man’s deteriorated health. “So, I can’t see him, then?”

“You can see him, but I should tell you it’ll probably be for the last time. We just didn’t expect anyone to come�”he hasn’t had visitors in over twenty years. It’s actually quite fortunate that you’re here.”

Her statement made Elijah frown. Nobody cared about this man at all, and that was just sad to him. Everyone should be missed by someone, especially if that person was about to die. As the desk witch led him up the stairs to the fourth floor, which housed the Janus Thickey Ward for Long-Term Spell Damage in which Lockhart resided.

When the door opened, Elijah involuntarily shivered. The room smacked of its inhabitants. There were drawings of Merlin only knows what pinned to the wall, gum wrappers all over the floor, and a general sense of disarray. She left him at the bedside of a man who looked old, but not overly so; it was unmistakably Gilderoy Lockhart.

He seemed to be asleep, but Elijah thought that the information he bore warranted waking him. Cautiously, he shook Lockhart’s shoulder until he awoke, a stupid grin on his face. It nearly felled Elijah’s courage when he saw the madness in the man’s eyes. It was likely that he would not even remember Sahira, or his own identity, for that matter, but he, Elijah, owed it to the poor bloke to at least try.

“Mister Lockhart, my name is Elijah. I have something to tell you that I thought was important for you to know.” There, he thought. At least it’s a start.

Lockhart cocked his head to the side, curious about his visitor. “Do I know you? You look slightly familiar.”

Knowing that Lockhart was probably trying to appear as if he were not mad, Elijah highly doubted that the man could possibly recognize him, considering he looked very little like his father, who was the only person of whom he could think that Lockhart might recognize. “Oh, you might. I just wanted to ask you something first.” Taking a deep breath to gird up his proverbial loins, Elijah took the plunge. “Do you remember Sahira?”

The demeanor on Lockhart’s face changed in a flash. It went from one of idiocy to one of wistfulness. Elijah felt better, knowing that the man could die with at least a shred of his sanity. “You see, I work at Flourish and Blotts, and I found the chapter of Year with the Yeti that was edited out. I decided to try to find Sahira, but I’m sorry to say she died last year. I’m sorry, sir.”

Tears welled up in Lockhart’s eyes. “Sahira,” he whispered, almost like a prayer. Elijah almost felt like he was intruding on a private moment, but he was not done, and he was determined to finish what he had set out to do.

“There’s one more thing, Mister Lockhart. The reason Sahira turned on you was�”“ This was a difficult secret to divulge, and Elijah heartily wished that he could foist the duty onto someone else, but he knew better than to think he could get that lucky. He continued hesitantly. “You see, she was pregnant. She didn’t want to tie you down and make you miserable; she knew how much you loved adventure. She didn’t want you to resent her, or your daughter, for it.”

Lockhart wore an expression that made Elijah feel ill, it was so pathetic. His face was a mixture of grief and overt misery. Obviously, his memory was not as shoddy as the staff of this ward had thought, because no one on the planet could conjure a look like that and not recognize the person by whom it was caused.

When Lockhart said nothing, Elijah felt discomfited by the tense silence between them. After a generous round of hedging noises, he finally said, “I’m sorry; I really am. I just thought that it was only fair that someone told you.”

Elijah dared to pat Lockhart on the shoulder before adding, “She always loved you, just so you know.”

The dying man’s eyes closed, and Elijah was alarmed by the thought that he may have died right there, so he shook the man’s shoulders once again, desperate to know that he had not just killed the man by breaking his heart. When Lockhart’s eyelids fluttered open, Elijah felt a great weight lift from his shoulders.

The ridiculous smile returned; Lockhart cheerily called, “Hi! Do I know you, young man?”

This visit had just become more than Elijah could bear. “Oh, no, sir. I think I have the wrong room.” Unwilling to endure that whole fiasco again, he left the room in haste.

Once he was back in the lobby, the same desk witch that had escorted him up the stairs looked at him inquisitively. “So, did your visit with your uncle go well?”

Nodding woodenly, Elijah croaked, “Oh, yeah. Thanks.” He strode out the door as fast as his legs, which had apparently decided to turn to Flobberworms, could carry him. He reached his boardinghouse in record speed for non-Apparition, because he was certain that he would not be able to concentrate properly to Apparate at that moment.

Elijah flopped down in his recliner, his mind heavy with the events of the morning. He had done what he set out to do, even despite the horrible dread he felt while doing it, but it seemed so unfair that a man could find out he had a daughter and not even be able to process that information. Then again, Elijah was not reasonably certain that he had fully absorbed everything that had happened over the past three days.

His brain felt like it was dangerously close to exploding, so Elijah abandoned his thoughts in favor of a large glass of Firewhiskey and a nap right there on the chair.

When he reawakened, Elijah checked his watch only to find that it was three in the morning. He had just slept for over twelve hours! It was his only day off for the next seven days, and he had wasted it sleeping. A tapping on the door, however, interrupted his self-deprecation; it would be the Daily Prophet delivery owl, right on schedule. He gave the owl its customary Knut and read the paper as he blindly strolled into his kitchenette and robotically made tea.

The headlines were nothing spectacular, but a small note on the third page caught his eye.

Gilderoy Lockhart Dies at Age 69

Former adventurer and author Gilderoy Lockhart died late last night of natural causes at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies. He had resided in there since 1992 when an accident with a Memory Charm damaged his brain permanently. He has no surviving relatives.

Elijah felt a funny sensation in his chest, which he supposed was some form of grief. He again mourned the injustice of nobody really caring that this man had died.

Resolution filled Elijah. He vowed that someone would remember Gilderoy Lockhart�”and not for the man they thought they knew, but for the man he really had been in the end. First, he wrote a quick missive to Asha to inform her of her father’s death, but, after that, he put his quill to parchment once more, this time for a different reason. After much thought, Elijah wrote the first line.

My Day With Gilderoy.