Dudley twitches, staring at the cake covetously.

She scoots it a little farther away from him.

"I don't know anything about my parents. Did they really die in a car crash?"

"—a car crash? Merlin's beard, why would yeh think such a thing?"

"Because that's what the Dursleys told me."

"You what?!" He roars to the cowering Dursleys. "James and Lily Potter dead in a car crash! That's outrageous! But wait—no owls, no Diagon Alley—did they not tell yeh anythin' about, about anythin'?!"

"No."

"No! Enough! I forbid you!"

"Ah shut up, Dursley, she's read her letter already—but ter think yeh'd never told her—surely yeh noticed summat was, well, diff'rent about yeh?" he says, directing that last part to Dorea.

"Yeah, but Uncle Vernon always yells a lot when weird things happen, so I've never been able to ask about it."

"An', an' they wouldn't give yeh yer letters, eh? And yeh got one anyway?"

"The day the first one showed up Uncle Vernon sent me to get the mail and I hid it because I knew he wouldn't let me keep it."

"You—you—"

"Did yeh think, what, Hogwarts'd jus'—forget about her? After ev'rything?"

"The letter was mine, Uncle Vernon. You can't keep me away from what my parents left me just because you hate me."

To Hagrid: "What do you mean everything?"

"Well. Yer a witch, Dorea, an' a thumpin' good'un, I'd say, once yeh've been trained up a bit. With a mum an' dad like yours, what else would yeh be? An' yer famous. Ev'ryone in our world knows yer name."

"Really!?"

"Aye—"

"She's not going."

She shoots him an incredulous look.

"I'd like ter see a great muggle like you stop her," Hagrid scoffs.

"We swore when we took her in we'd put a stop to that rubbish," says Uncle Vernon, "swore we'd stamp it out of her! Witch indeed!"

"Wait, so that's why you made me sleep in a cupboard and shouted at me whenever the subject of magic came up?"

"Of course. Of course we knew you'd be that, and of course you wouldn't stop! How could you, my dratted sister being what she was? Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that—that school—and came home every vacation with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was—a freak! But for my mother and father, oh no, it was Lily this and Lily that, they were proud of having a witch in the family!" She stops to draw a deep breath and then goes ranting on. It seems she`s been wanting to say all this for years. "Then she met that Potter at school and they left and got married and had you, and of course I knew you'd be just the same, just as strange, just as, as—abnormal—and then, if you please, she went and got herself blown up and we got landed with you!"

"Aunt Petunia, I've read enough books to know keeping your niece in a cupboard isn't normal."

"Neither are you."