Snape opened his eyes.
He found his fingers clenched tight, his nails digging into his palms.
He loosened his hands.
Took a deep breath.
Then he turned his gaze back to the desktop.
Those words Percy Weasley had written-
"Seven years of magical education uprooted us from the Muggle world."
But Eileen Prince had not been uprooted by magical education.
She had uprooted herself.
A young lady who had once belonged to the pure-blood aristocracy.
A Prince, of one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight Pure-blood families.
She had married Tobias Snape.
A Muggle.
A working-class man.
A man who was chronically unemployed, drank heavily, had a violent temper, and abused his family.
The Prince family had disowned her for it.
Cut her off completely.
No financial support.
No social network.
No way back.
She had voluntarily withdrawn from the wizarding world.
Never returned to Diagon Alley.
Had no contact with wizards.
Sought no magical work.
Never entered the Ministry of Magic.
Lived in complete seclusion in a Muggle slum.
But she could not survive in the Muggle world either.
She had entered Hogwarts at eleven and graduated at eighteen.
Seven years.
She had never had the chance to learn anything Muggle.
She could not type.
Could not do arithmetic.
Could not operate factory machinery.
Much less dare use magic in front of Muggles-that violated the International Statute of Secrecy.
She had no skills at all.
She had nowhere to go.
She was trapped in Spinner's End, trapped beside that man, trapped in that moldy house.
Like a bird with clipped wings, shut in a cage without a lock.
It was not the cage that imprisoned her.
She had forgotten that her wings could grow back.
Snape picked up the book, Learned Helplessness.
Turned to the page he had dog-eared.
"When a