Once Bella was back at Malfoy Manor, she went up to the room that she had been staying in. It was a large room with a large four-poster bed and large windows which made the room feel light and airy. She cast a silencing charm on the door so that nobody would be able to hear her, sat down on the bed and for the first time in a very long time, she allowed herself to cry. These tears had been building up for weeks, ever since that night at the Ministry, but tonight was the first night that she knew she would not be interrupted. Narcissa was probably so relieved at the outcome of their meeting with Snape that she would spend the evening by the fire in the drawing room – she did this when she was happy – Lucius was in Azkaban, Draco would not bother her in her room and the Dark Lord was not in the house. So Bella sat on the bed, safe in the knowledge that she would not be disturbed as she finally allowed herself to grieve her cousin. To finally acknowledge these feelings, rather than supress them and allow them to explode when she was angry, as she had been tonight.
Eventually, the tears dried up, and Bella found herself laying curled up on the bed. She hadn't closed the curtains, and the sun was beginning to rise. She was starting to get hungry but, looking at her bloodshot eyes in the mirror, knew she could not venture out of the room yet. If she was seen looking like this, she would be discovered. They would know that she had been crying all night, and would find out why. So Bella sat back down on the bed, thinking about her cousin, and how much she regretted not being able to protect him. She thought all about her own childhood and how much she now wished to have been sorted into Hufflepuff. If she had been, she might not now be in this mess. She might have been even more scarred physically – her parents, after that first time they had used the Cruciatus Curse on her, had not refrained from using Unforgivable Curses to harm her if she did something wrong. Bella knew that Narcissa was the least scarred out of her sisters, as she was the youngest so had learned at a much earlier age what the consequences of wrong-doing would be, and she had pleased their parents. Andromeda had married a muggle-born, and her father had cursed her for so long when she told him that she was almost driven insane.
This line of musing caused Bella to think of Frank and Alice Longbottom. They really had gone insane, and it had all been because of Bella. Looking back, Bella realised that she had been wrong to push the Aurors for so long, but at the time she had been convinced that they had information. Information that would help her bring back the Dark Lord. But she had been wrong. She had seen it in Alice's face, and she had done nothing to stop the torture. What did that say about her? What did it say about Bella that she could not say to her husband, brother-in-law, and close friend – was he really a close friend though? They had been in the Dark Lord's inner circle but that made them merely acquaintances rather than friends – that they needed to stop? Looking back, Bella wished that she had had the courage to say that the Aurors knew nothing. Looking back, Bella realised that she would do almost anything to go back and stop the return of the Dark Lord. She would do almost anything to stop him rising to power in the first place. If it weren't for the Dark Lord, Sirius and Regulus would both be alive, she would not be feeling such enormous weights of guilt and shame and she might actually be happy rather than slightly insane. Bella realised that she was crying again, and wiped her eyes.
She thought briefly of Neville Longbottom, the boy from whom she had taken almost everything, but was so strong. This boy who should have grown up with parents who loved and cherished him, but who instead had lived a life probably full of misery as he visited the parents who no longer remembered who he was. It was all her fault. NO! It was all the Dark Lord's fault. He had started this. He had started the war which had killed her cousins, and in a way, which had killed her. She may have put up walls during her time at Hogwarts, but she had always had doubts about her family's morals and point of view. It hadn't been until she had begun to spend time with the Dark Lord, she now realised, that she had lost her morality. Or perhaps more accurately, she had pushed her conscience so far away, and locked it so deep within herself that she could not hear the doubts that she had once had. But she realised them now. She realised that she had once been a little girl on the Hogwarts Express who was saddened by the fact that the other girl she had met didn't want to be friends with her anymore because of the connotations of the house that she was likely to be placed in. The house which she had essentially asked to be in because she knew the wrath that she would face from her parents if she had been placed in Hufflepuff. It felt to Bella that a huge weight had been lifted off of her since she had come to this realisation, but it soon fell back onto her as an even darker realisation came to her. She would never be able to tell these thoughts to anyone. If the Dark Lord ever found out that she blamed him for the evil person she had become today, he would kill her. That thought didn't bother her – she felt as though she deserved to die, she had done such horrible things – but she knew that he would also kill her entire family. And she could not think about more of her family dying because of her.
Bella now knew that she would have to create a façade if she was going to succeed in deceiving the Dark Lord. Perhaps she and Snape were more alike than she had originally thought. Bella was still convinced that Snape had been hiding something, both from her and the Dark Lord; she just didn't know what it was. Bella looked into the mirror again, and saw that she now looked as though she had had a bad night's sleep, rather than that she had been crying all night. If anyone saw her and asked about it, she would simply say that she had been unable to get to sleep. She went downstairs, and saw to her relief that there was nobody in the dining room. The table was empty, so Bella went into the kitchen to get some food. The Malfoy's no longer had a House-Elf, as Dobby had accidentally been set free, so Bella buttered some bread and took it back up to her room – she still didn't want to talk to anyone as she debated with herself how best to deceive the Dark Lord. In the end, she decided to modify her memory of the night, so that she still remembered the whole conversation with Snape and Narcissa, but removed all of the feelings of guilt and shame, as well as her recollections about Sirius during their childhood. She also removed everything she had thought about that morning – how it was all the Dark Lord's fault that her family had been torn apart, how she wished that he had never risen to power, and how she deeply regretted becoming one of his servants and everything that she had done in his name.
Completing memory modifications on oneself is a mentally exhausting exercise and Bella fell asleep as soon as she had done it. She awoke a few hours later feeling very refreshed, and having no memory of what she had done. She still felt guilty about Sirius' death, but had no recollection of any feelings from the previous night. Bella was such a proficient witch that she was oblivious to the fact that she had never gone to sleep after coming back from Snape's. Her new perspective was that she had come back to Malfoy Manor, gone up to her bedroom, fallen asleep quickly and deeply and had only just awoken. It was only seven thirty in the morning, which was not an unusual time for her to wake up, so she got up and went down to breakfast where she found Narcissa eating some toast.