Well, if Ben had felt guilty before, that comment really left him feeling like shit.

"Oh," he said, because what the fuck did you say to something like that? Quidditch had been her thing — she'd played for years, even after getting married, and had only quit when she was pregnant. She'd been back in as a coach, and he supposed he might have heard vaguely that she wasn't doing that anymore, but he hadn't really known that it meant she was not doing Quidditch anymore, like as a Whole Thing. He didn't really know Dez as a person — knew her primarily as Art's wife — but he knew what that was like, a little bit, because he'd quit Quidditch when his parents had died, and he'd been rather miserable about it for years afterwards. Did she feel vaguely guilty, like he had? In Ben's case it had all be abstract — his parents disapproved of Quidditch and he was off practicing it when they died — but in her case there might have been much more tangible guilt. She'd been there when it had happened — maybe she thought it wouldn't have happened if she'd been somewhere else.

"I didn't know," Ben said, after a long pause. It was true, he hadn't, but he felt awful for having pulled the conversation in this direction all the same.