“Dad would be home soon. This might work to my advantage. I knew bringing the guy home would royally piss him off. He’d have puppies if he found a stranger in the house. Hell, he might even have a llama.”

“He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him.”

“He [dad] always had some kind of trouble with his leg. He’d have bandages wrapped around it all the time but he’d never go and see a doctor. He’d rather have dropped dead than go to a doctor. He was terrified of them, like a lot of people his age were. And he’d never take a day off work. If he ever stayed at home feeling ill, it was time to call the undertaker.”

“Wherever he went he would be a stranger, for there was no home in the world for such as he.”

“He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home.”

“We’re takin’ Faye home.”“Got that.”“Son, I need to know which home we’re takin’ her to.”Jesus.Was the church deacon Dad of the virgin girlfriend he’d deflowered asking him which bed he wanted to sleep in with his daughter that night?“Yours or hers?” Silas continued.Fucking hell, he was.”