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There was only one way this would come out that would be acceptable. The moment that he mentioned Drystan, though, she felt very much as if she couldn't bring herself to bring up that one way. Her hands were shaking something terrible, her breath was coming in uneven bursts. What was it that her therapist had been saying? She wasn't emotionally equipped to deal well with stress, the lack of particularly stressful situations in her youth had caused her not to have developed ... something.

It was really hard to listen to him ramble when she was pretty sure he wasn't very much older than her. She looked down at her hands, tried to quell the feeling that she was going to pass out.

No, she thought, someone had to find out eventually.

But why had it been Henry? Why couldn't she just have told him at her own pace? She frowned to herself. If she was going to tell Henry about what had happened with Drystan, he deserved some sort of backup knowledge.

"My name is Heidi Twilfit. But before that -- it was Heidi Barnes." She wondered dully if the name meant anything to him or if he was going to assume she was just making this up. "My husband ..." She couldn't say his name, it was caught in her throat and if she said it she was going to vomit all over Henry's countertop, "...Ellis. He was ... neutralized by the Aurors." She spit those last three words out -- that's what they'd said in the papers, neutralized. Like he was some sort of animal.

Henry was probably beginning to wonder what on earth this had to do with Drystan Fawcett. "I didn't deal with it well. They took me to St. Mungo's, and --" she swallowed thickly. "And Drystan had the misfortune of being one of the first men that I saw. I had ... what the healers call ... a psychotic break." Merlin, this all made her look so terrible, but at the same time everything was coming out in a rush of feeling and emotion.

"And I thought that Drystan was my husband. I needed to believe that he was my husband because I couldn't process the thought of Ellis being dead." He'd been such a good man. "And I did some terrible things and now his wife hates me and..." She trailed off, unable to do anything but look at her hands (which were now folded in her lap).

"And I'll understand if you hate me too."