At no point had Ford ever seriously believed that it would have anything to do with a curse. He knew Witch Weekly was unreliable on their best of days, and this didn’t even seem like one of their better efforts. Weird old-money pureblood families might have strange customs, but cursing their own children? It didn’t make any sense, and even if it was true it wouldn’t have explained why Macnair hadn’t just fucking told him. Unless this was some sort of curse-within-a-curse that prevented anyone from talking about it, but even then, Macnair had clearly told someone that he was engaged, because it was printed in plain black and white in the bloody Prophet.

“No, of course it doesn’t,” he said, with more bitterness in his tone than he had any reasonable explanation for. Ford was aware that he was causing a minor scene, at this point, and he was lucky that it was only Cash Lestrange he was talking to, but he still needed to get a handle on himself — he couldn’t afford to be notably pissed off at the Lestrange family for no explicable reason.

“Sorry,” he said to Lestrange, rather genuinely — Cash of all people did not deserve to be on the receiving end of his impotent frustration at Macnair. “I should’ve canceled tonight. I thought I’d be better at — not thinking about it,” he admitted. He usually was very good at compartmentalizing, but this had gotten under his skin in a way that very little had been able to do.

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