"Alice?" he said hesitantly. She was playing with one of the kittens, tussling with it as it lay on its back. The other kitten was curled up at the end of the bed grooming.

When his mum looked up, he said, "I brought someone else to visit you. This is my friend Hermione. I've told you about her – a long time ago – but maybe you don't remember." He'd told his mum about Hermione, and the other students in his year, many times before, when she didn't seem to hear him. He hadn't talked about them since she'd begun talking back.

"Hi, Alice." Hermione stepped closer to the bed and petted the grooming kitten, which immediately stopped licking its tail and rubbed ecstatically against Hermione's hand. "I like your kittens," Hermione said.

His mum looked up shyly. His Gran, who had said remarkably little about Hermione coming along with them, gave Hermione what might have been an encouraging look before she sat down beside her son.

Neville dragged another chair from the other side of the room and motioned for Hermione to sit down. "Can I pick him up?" Hermione asked, stroking the kitten.

"She's a girl," Neville's mum said in her soft, raspy voice. "But you can pick her up."

"I have a cat, too," Hermione said as she lifted the kitten into her arms. "But he's much bigger."

"Does he like to chase gnomes?"

"Oh yes," Hermione said, smiling. "There aren't any at our house – my parents are Muggles – but he really likes to chase the ones at the Weasleys'."

"You know the Weasleys?" his mum asked. "Do you know Bilius?"

"Er . . . no," Hermione said. She glanced at Neville. "I know Ron and Ginny – and Fred and George . . ." She paused. "Was that bad?" she whispered to Neville.

"I don't know," he whispered back helplessly.

"Fred and George are twins," his mum said.

He and Hermione both looked at her hard. "That's right," Hermione said encouragingly.

His mum frowned. "I only met them once or twice. Buggered if I could tell which was which. I'm not sure Molly could either - Fred probably started out as George."

Neville wasn't sure whether he wanted to exchange excited looks with Hermione, or just giggle at his mum's swearing.

Hermione looked as though she might be doing some quick thinking. "Fred and George would have been about - three years old, the last time you saw them?"

"Three," his mum said. "Running around weaving in and out of people's ankles. I told Molly if they were mine I'd put different colored dots on them, like Grania used to do to tell her gerbils apart . . ." She trailed off, her brow furrowing, and her body shrinking almost imperceptibly in on itself. "That's . . . Grania got some gerbils last year that her aunt found in a Muggle shop, and they were all the same color, and we named them after the wizards on the Chocolate Frog cards, but we couldn't tell them apart, and she put dots on their heads . . . and Molly . . ."

Neville glanced over at Hermione and shrugged. His mum's lucid moment had lasted a bit longer this time, but she had clearly confused herself again by talking about Molly as a grown-up and the mother of children.

Hermione gave him a bit of a look that he couldn't make out, and then she said casually, "I think I know Grania - she was in Ravenclaw, wasn't she?"

"Oh no," his mum said absently, stroking one of the kittens which had come nuzzling up to her chin. "Gryffindor. The whole family was Gryffindor except Siobhan - I mean - I mean when Grania goes to Hogwarts, of course she'll be in Gryffindor. All her family are."

Hermione was quiet for a while on their way back to school. When she finally spoke, she said, "It's really good, Neville. She's really remembering now, only she's still too scared to admit what she remembers, even to herself."

"Do you think there's anything we could do to help?" he asked her.

"Well . . ." She brightened. "Maybe if we found out more about her friends, the people she's talking about, we would be able to remind her better."

Now that Hermione had a research project, nothing would stop her. She came back from the library one day with an enormous very old book that nevertheless looked neither dusty nor falling apart.

"Madam Pince let me borrow it to show you if I was very careful. It's a copy of the school records - every student who ever attended Hogwarts is listed here, and it tells who their relations were." She thumped the book down on one of the tables in the common room and flipped it open to a page she had marked. "Here's Molly Prewett, Gryffindor. Five years after her there's an Alice, Alice MacLeod - is that your mum? Your dad's in the same year?" At Neville's nod she continued. "Here's a Grania Riley in her year, in Gryffindor. Grania had eight sisters and one brother who all attended Hogwarts, and they were all in Gryffindor except the fourth girl, Siobhan." She turned the book around so that he could look at it. "See," she continued, "her sister Mairead was in the same class as Harry's parents."

Neville scanned the list of magically linked names that showed all the Rileys were siblings. "It must be the right family - my mum mentioned these two, Fiona and Kathleen, as well. The youngest, the boy, Sean, didn't leave Hogwarts until the year before we arrived. Oh!" He traced his finger over the name 'Nona Riley, 1982-1989.' "She's the one who gave my mum her kittens. Gran said the family had been neighbors of my mum's when they were growing up, and that my mum used to mind Nona."

"Huh," Hermione said, looking over his shoulder. "Nona - the ninth daughter. That's . . . appropriate, I suppose."

Neville wasn't thinking about what her name meant. "Do you really think any of this will help my Mum?"

"I think it might," Hermione said hopefully. "You saw what happened when she was tricked into remembering some of her old classmates . . . maybe the next time you visit her, you could talk about Nona Riley giving her the kittens. Maybe your mum would remember minding her."

"She didn't before . . ." Neville said doubtfully.

It wasn't exactly like the dark times, but she was afraid. She was so confused - she had someone else's memories, pictures of someone else's life in her head, and the pictures, although they weren't scary, made her feel afraid. The worst was when a flood seemed to open in her mind and all sorts of things flowed through that she knew she shouldn't have seen: she was looking at the Sorting Hat on its stool with the rest of the school watching in interest; she was wearing a pretty dress and watching her neighbor Molly Prewett marry a proud but terrified-looking Arthur Weasley; she was stopping a small boy with lanky black hair and a crooked nose from taunting a group of Muggleborns on the Hogwarts Express; she was looking after a small auburn-haired toddler who insisted on chasing the cats all over the garden; she was at a naming party for Molly's sixth child and a pair of identical terrors were attempting to turn her shoes into rabbits . . .

She couldn't stop it; her mind seemed to change all by itself and she couldn't do anything about it. All she could do was hold tightly to her kittens and tell herself over and over what she knew for sure: she was safe in her room, nothing could get her here with her kittens on her belly and the nice boy who came to see her - the dark couldn't come in here, it couldn't, not even if some of the pictures made her stomach hurt and reminded her that something was wrong, something was very wrong . . .

And sometimes one of the pictures was of a baby boy, with a round perfect face and dark hair, and even though he was a pretty baby, the image made her body go stiff with pain and she cried out as her kittens anxiously licked her face.

The next time Hermione accompanied Neville to visit his mother, she immediately engaged his mum in a conversation about kitten behavior and body language. His mum responded enthusiastically, describing how her kittens perked their ears up when they were curious about something and laid them flat when they were about to start wrestling. The kittens in question were at that moment having a joyous mutual licking session at the foot of the bed, cleaning each other's ears and purring loudly together. With a subtlety that he envied, Hermione began slipping things into the conversation that his mum barely even noticed - things about his mum's schoolfriends, about girls who had been younger than his mum in Gryffindor, and about the names of spells that a six-year-old child would not have known. Things seemed to be going very well indeed, until Hermione mentioned the Expelliarmus spell and his mum froze.

Hermione noticed it too, and they both sat very still watching his mum. Her eyes went blank, and one hand automatically stroked the head of the kitten nearest her, but she did not seem to be comforted by its presence. Her lips moved soundlessly for a long moment, and then she softly whispered, "Expelliarmus. Expel - Expelliarmus. Expelliar . . ." Tears filled her eyes and she shut them tightly. Hermione looked stricken and whispered, "Oh no, oh no, what did I do, Neville, what's wrong?"

"I don't know," he whispered back.

"I don't know - I don't know," his mum echoed on the bed, her eyes still clamped shut, tears leaking from them and streaming down her face. "I don't - where's - where's Neville?" she said, suddenly sounding alarmed and frightened. "Where's Neville?" she repeated much more loudly. "Nev - Expelliarmus! Expelliarmus! Expel - Neville - no - no - Expelli . . ." Her voice trailed off into quiet crying once more, and she turned on her side and wrapped her arms tightly around her cat.

One of the nearly invisible orderlies ran hurriedly out of the ward. Neville glanced up and saw his grandmother standing at the end of the bed, her face pale and drawn, her lips set in a tight line. Hermione looked as though she might cry any moment, and she took no notice of the other kitten which had crept into her lap.

"She used to say things like that," his grandmother said quietly. Her eyes flickered toward her son, but when she saw that he had not stirred from his catatonia, she continued, "When they first brought her here. For two weeks she screamed your name, cried your father's name, shouted spells that would do her no good . . . eventually she stopped - one day I came, and they told me she had stopped screaming. They thought it meant she was getting better. They weren't in the permanent ward then, you know, we still thought there might be some hope . . ."

Neither Neville nor Hermione moved; they both sat in fascinated silence as his grandmother told her story.

"I sat by her bedside - your father had already gone quiet, he hadn't spoken since the first night and he barely moved - but your mother, even after she stopped screaming, she cried, she lay and cried all day for . . . so many days. You never knew - sometimes when someone touched her it seemed to help, other times it seemed to cause her great pain. We brought you in once, Neville, thinking that perhaps she was worried about you, but she - she wouldn't hold you, she cried and pushed you away."

Neville felt his stomach sink into his knees, but his grandmother didn't seem to have noticed.

"We had brought some of your toys as well," she continued, "to keep you happy on the way over - we had to come on the Knight Bus. She wouldn't hold you, but she took hold of one of your teddy bears and wouldn't let it go. I think that was really when she began to be - the way she has been, for as long as you can remember."

"That - that makes sense," Hermione said, after clearing her throat. She did not look any less guilty for upsetting his mum. "If that was when her mind - broke, when she went back to being a little girl - of course she couldn't hold you, Neville, she couldn't acknowledge that she had a child because it would conflict with what she'd convinced herself, that she was only a little child herself."

This made him feel a tiny bit better because it made such good sense, but he couldn't shake off the terrible leaden feeling that had come over him when he learned that his mum had rejected him, hadn't wanted to see him.

The Healer came striding over to his mum's bed at that point, his voice cutting through the silence that had fallen over them. "The orderly said that our patient had become quite upset, that she was crying out."

"She did become rather upset," his grandmother replied calmly as they all watched the Healer bend down and examine his mum. "She appears to have become frightened by something one of the children said."

"What did you say?" the Healer asked, his attention turning toward Neville and Hermione.

"Er," Neville began.

"We were just telling her about the last Quidditch match at school," Hermione said quickly. Both Neville and his grandmother looked at her, but the Healer didn't appear to have noticed. "Maybe - we told her a boy got hit by a Bludger, I think we might have frightened her. Will she be all right?"

The Healer cast one last look at Neville's mum, whose tears had subsided into a quiet rocking of the cat in her arms. "No different than usual, I'd say," he declared. "Perhaps you ought to try to tell her only about peaceful things, eh?"

When the Healer had left, Neville looked inquiringly at Hermione. "I - I don't know, I thought it should be a secret," she said, glancing between him and his grandmother. "I didn't think anyone should know yet that she seemed to remember something about when she was hurt."

Neville's grandmother turned a long, appraising gaze on Hermione. "You may be right about that," she said quietly.

"She's still out," Neville blurted suddenly. His head spun and he felt ill and faint all at the same time; his ears seemed full of a mocking voice telling him that she had met his parents . . . "They haven't caught her, she's still out there somewhere."

His grandmother's eyes flickered sharply toward his mother's bed, and Neville took her warning. He clamped his lips shut, seeing by Hermione's wide eyes that she was equally frightened, but his mum didn't appear to have heard anything they said. Her eyes were still closed but not so tightly, and the kitten had gone calmly to sleep in her arms.

When she woke up, her dream was fuzzy in her mind. She had been playing in the garden with a whole litter of tiny ginger-colored kittens, and her friend Grania was sitting over by the flowerbed with another kitten in her lap. Then she heard a terrible scream, and the kittens bolted for the shelter of the barn nearby as Molly Prewett came running up the lawn, shouting something about her brothers. Then Grania wasn't Grania anymore, she was another girl that Alice knew but couldn't quite remember, and she was school age but something was telling Alice that she was younger than Grania. She was clutching the orange kitten in her lap and crying in fear. Alice was shouting, "No - Nona - run, run away!" And a terrible black-haired woman was striding across the lawn toward them with a group of dark men in her wake, and Alice began to scream and scream until her voice ran out and she couldn't scream anymore. That was where the dream ended, the people just kept coming across the lawn without getting any closer, and she just kept screaming inside her head until she woke up, and she grabbed for her kittens and hugged them tight. She knew the dark was coming.

Thanks to all my reviewers! I'm looking forward to continuing with this story again.