Everything was swimming. The fluorescent lights in the café burned brighter than fiendfyre, and had burned spots into her vision. Closing her eyes hadn’t helped much. His hand was an anchor to reality. His words sounded as if they were drifting across an ocean, ripped into shreds by wind and waves, and she couldn’t sort through them. He’d said something—left—her hands were so fucking cold now, as if she had just plunged them into ice water.

He wasn’t going to come back. It was foolish to expect anything else. Her elbows dropped to the table, her forehead into her palms, as she tried to find herself in the burning cold. She tried to even out her breaths, to think, but everything was sparks and shivers and spinning, spinning, spinning. She had to remember something, but her thoughts were like rain water, running away to join rivers of sensation she couldn’t keep her head above.

Someone was talking. The words alternated between whispers and shouts, blurring into the background noise of the café. Her eyes eased open, stinging in the light, and refused to focus for a long moment. It might have been Justin, it might have been Harry Fucking Potter himself. Phoebe wasn’t sure. His face was melting. That was peculiar. The last time she had seen a face melt, it had belonged to a six year old boy whose mother had used him in dark magic. He had melted on the table, conscious until the very end. But this wasn’t St. Mungos, was it? She didn’t think so.

“What?” She wasn’t sure the word even came out properly. Her tongue felt clumsy, like it was made of iron instead of flesh. “I don’t know—“