He should have anticipated that he would be asked more about this flight of fancy, and Tilda didn't even have as much of a stake in it as some people — his family, for example — would. Noble shrugged. "I guess it's one of those weeks where I make a lot of beauty potions for bored debutantes," he said. That wasn't untrue, and the beauty potions for bored debutantes were not his favorite part of the job, but it had never caused him real frustration. The real problem was his lingering guilt and his dreams of corpses, but he couldn't explain that — not in The Three Broomsticks, and not ever.

"Sometimes it doesn't feel like the — academic use of my talents I'd envisioned," he elaborated with a wry smile. That was true, too. Noble wasn't really experimenting, wasn't really doing anything inventive — he would test potions on himself at times, but that was a quality check. He wasn't actually creating anything new.

And another secret, beyond that — he'd become a potioneer in order to establish independence as a middle class man early. With the Greengrass finances in the state they were in, and without Daff in his life, there was no reason for Noble to pursue independence the way he had when he first left Hogwarts. He was never going to find it.

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