"He was too confident."
Umbridge's lips twisted into a smile.
"He thought burying me in purchase orders for pumpkin juice would shut me up."
"He thought those tens of thousands of pages of reports could trap Dolores Umbridge forever."
"But he forgot one thing."
She jabbed the tip of her quill hard against the last line of the parchment.
"I'm the best woman in the Ministry of Magic at finding fault."
"Finding fault doesn't take magic, a wand, or even brains."
"All it takes is patience and a pair of critical eyes."
She began leafing through the school rules.
Page by page.
Rule by rule.
She drew little five-pointed stars in pink ink beside every possible loophole.
The night breeze slipped through a gap in the window, stirring the pink sheets of parchment on the desk.
The cat on the porcelain plate on the desk blinked, keeping vigil for her mistress.
And Umbridge herself had not even realized-
The very things she was doing were precisely what Lupin had not yet had time to finish.
They were the things Douglas and Sirius had no time to do.
The safety certifications hastily skipped in the training procedures, the stages pushed through heavy-handedly without proper documentation, the administrative details overlooked amid passion and urgency-
Now someone would help them sort through every last one.
And she would do it more thoroughly, more exactingly, and more watertightly than they could themselves.
Because Umbridge's goal was to find fault.
But the other side of finding fault was improvement.
Of course, this was only the beginning.
If Douglas and Sirius knew what Umbridge was thinking.
They would surely smile and pat each other's dog heads.
After all, every monkey needed its own leash.
Meanwhile.
In the corridor outside the Wizengamot chamber, several brass wall lamps