Ben certainly didn't know either, since he'd only come up with this plan twenty mintues ago and had yet to think it through, but he didn't want to admit that. He'd gotten out of his own head enough to notice that Melody seemed to be getting deeper and deeper into hers: she was functioning, lighting fires and getting the essential things unpacked, but she obviously had something heavy on her mind. And he couldn't really blame her, since at the Abbott house he'd told her he thought something bad was going to happen to her and then hadn't offered any explanation about what would happen or why he believed that. She must have been imagining a dozen worst-case scenarios by now. Maybe she was imagining things that might hurt her, or maybe she was imagining that something was wrong with him — flying here from Hogwarts, looking crazed, claiming something bad might happen. He knew it sounded crazy, and he wouldn't have begrudged her for thinking he was crazy. But he didn't know what to do about it, if she did, except wait it out and see whether or not anything had changed.

Well, if it hadn't changed, he knew one thing certainly: he didn't want to let her go without having held her again. "Come here," he suggested, holding his arms out for her.

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