We meet in words | Draco Malfoy (rewriting)

13.

Isabella

Isabella observed the silence of the night pressed against the small window of her cramped room, a quiet so profound it teetered between peace and suffocation.

She traced the worn leather of the journal resting in her lap, her fingers ghosting over its surface like it was something fragile, something alive.

This journal was the only thing keeping her together.

It had belonged to her grandmother.

The first time she was punished, she was locked inside for an entire weekend.

Not just inside the house. Inside her room.

But she couldn't stay in there, trapped between four walls and her own unraveling thoughts. She had to move, had to breathe.

So she did what had to be done.

She escaped.

Slipping down the long, dim corridors of the mansion, she found herself in a forgotten room, swallowed by dust and time. A library.

The scent of aged paper clung to the air as she stepped inside, her presence stirring the quiet. Towers of books loomed over her, their spines cracked with age, their stories waiting.

And then, she saw them.

A row of journals, leather-bound and neat, each one filled with the words of a woman long gone.

Zaria Jones.

Her grandmother—though not by blood, but by something deeper.

Isabella had never truly belonged to her real grandmother. Yasmin Anderson made that clear. Isabella was nothing more than the result of a drunken mistake, and Yasmin despised her for it. With venomous, burning hatred.

But in Zaria's words, she found something she never had before.

Connection.

She turned to the seventh journal in the series, the pages brittle beneath her touch.

July 5th, 1975

He struck me again.

I don't understand. If he loves me, why does he hurt me?

I thought we had moved past this. Past the lies, the infidelity. He laughed in my face for so long that my tears felt like a joke. And then, one day, he let me in. He ended things with her. He allowed me to love him, and for the first time, I thought I was enough.

It felt like flying.

But I should have known better. Even as he started holding me at night, even as he whispered 'sweet dreams' against my skin, I still cried myself to sleep.

And now he has scarred me again.

Not just my skin—but deeper. Somewhere I can never reach, never heal. But I tell myself that his love will be enough to cover the wounds. To bury them where they won't haunt me.

His hands left bruises on my body, marks of my own weakness. Proof that I was not the wife he needed. Proof that I could never be enough.

It's no surprise he returned to another woman's bed.

And how am I supposed to tell him? How do I explain that I cannot give him the family he craves?

Infertile.

That's what the doctor said when I believed, for the first time, that I might be pregnant. That I might finally give him a reason to stay.

But I can't. And I won't.