There were magical methods to detect when someone was lying, but he didn't think sharing that particular information with her was likely to help anything. It seemed rather far-fetched that anyone would use veritaserum or one of its alternatives on a child that talking about this would only scare her unnecessarily, he thought. It wasn't as though it would be terribly common to lie to the Hogwarts faculty when enrolling a child, he thought, and so no one would be looking for lies. But if they did get suspicious for one reason or another, it wouldn't take a magical truth-serum to get to the bottom of things. They could just ask for some piece of documentation that they didn't have, or, simpler still, ask her to prove her anatomy, which she wouldn't be able to do. Not, at any rate, without some complicated and potentially uncomfortable bit of transfiguration magic — but if they were at the point where anyone was asking, they'd probably end up calling the whole thing off, he figured. They couldn't keep a ruse up for seven years if those around her were that suspicious from the outset.

Billie had agreed to a week, but rather than showing any relief at being able to put it off, she looked quite miserable. Was the weight of this going to drag her down for the whole week? He regretted again that it had come up at such an opportune moment, because they'd only just started looking for her wand and now he was worried that the occasion would be ruined by her (quite justified) sulking.

"Do you want to try another wand?" he asked tentatively. "It's okay if you're not in the mood anymore. I shouldn't've... well, I should have talked to you about this earlier," he clarified. "But I kept hoping something would happen and I'd find a way to fix it all, I suppose."