Harry Potter icons arranged in a heart

I nearly didn't come to the reunion. The invitation said Old Boys and Girls of Cold Harbour Grammar, and I stood in the hall for ten minutes trying to decide whether I was still either. Then Mrs Pargeter's name came up on the board beside the house cup we never won, and I thought of you sulking by the fence, and I went in.

You'll be pleased to hear the motorbike is still in Dennis's garage. He has spent thirty years insisting it only needs a new carburettor. We stood beside it in the drizzle and he said, "It flew once," and nobody argued, because we all remembered the hedge at the bottom of Fallow Lane.

Something happened at the end of the night that I want to tell you before I lose my nerve. Ruth brought the brass key we found in the lost property cupboard in fourth year, the one that fitted nothing in the building. She pressed it into my palm in the car park and said she had kept it because one of us would one day need to open something. I laughed, but I took it home, and the lock on my late mother's writing box turned under it as if it had been waiting.

Inside was a quill, its nib worn grey, and a folded note in Ruth's hand: Keep the little gold ball you took off the shelf, you'll need sharp eyes. I have no idea what she meant, but I am coming to the next one. Write back and tell me you are too.

Yours in ink, Bea