Something had woken Petunia up. It was the sound of her baby crying. She'd read somewhere that mothers always tuned in to the sound of their babies crying even when nothing else could wake them up, and that seemed to be true even when the baby had just turned 17. She felt so woozy, but she must listen to Dudley's voice, hear what he was saying and if there was anything she could do to make it all better.
"…need her to be my Mummy," he was wailing. "She can't go away to Hogwarts. She just can't!"
The Malfoy boy was speaking to him then, in firm tones laced with just the right amount of compassion. "But don't you spend most of your time at Smeltings anyway, Dudley? When you're there it doesn't really matter if she's here or not, right?"
"But she couldn't send me letters and care packages from Hogwarts," Dudley sniffed. "And she couldn't call me on the phone. I'd have to be away from her for the whole year."
Her nephew's voice broke in then, impatient and not the least bit compassionate. "Don't you see that this whole thing is ridiculous? Do you honestly think that a 40-year-old woman is going to enroll as a first-year at a boarding school? Beyond that, do you honestly think your mother would ever want to go? And beyond that, do you honestly think that your father would ever let his wife enroll at Hogwarts?" Harry's voice had become louder with each question until he was shouting now. It hurt Petunia's head most dreadfully.
If Harry had expected his words to knock some sense into Dudley, it clearly hadn't worked, because he started wailing even louder than before. "What's wrong now, Dudley?" Harry snapped.
"It's Daddy. If he ever finds out Mummy's a witch, he'll kill her!"
Petunia wished that she could run into the living room, smother her son with kisses and reassure him that he was completely wrong, but she was afraid he was right, and she felt much too weak to get up anyway.
She lay back on the bed with a sigh. It was so lumpy and hard. Vaguely she started to wonder where she was. Cautiously she opened her eyes and stared up at a sloping ceiling with a bare lightbulb hanging from it. Ah, that explained it. She was in the cupboard under the stairs. With a sigh of resignation, she rolled over and went back to sleep.