She watched him leave, forgetting his jacket, leaving it there draped silently over the chair. She wondered if she closed her eyes, if she could still remember him, the way he laughed, the way his eyes twinkled, the way he looked when he was angry, or the way his hair looked in the morning: black as night and messy, as if he had just played a fierce game of Quidditch. She wondered if she would miss him.

She wondered if she wanted to.

Perhaps she would someday mourn the tiny piece of her heart that had belonged to him. Perhaps she would regret looking in his eyes and fearing what she would see there. Perhaps she would punish herself for whatever she had done to deserve this. Perhaps she should have given him a chance.

But she hadn’t, and all that she had left was the jacket draped over the chair in the small dusty restaurant. Everything and nothing like what she had hoped to have. She felt like crying and had no idea why.

She was everything that everyone else had called her: a tart, a tease, and a slut. Everything she had promised herself that she would never be. And now she was; her very being exactly what she showed the rest of the world. Her mask was now her personality and she mourned the loss of somebody she wished she had become. Sitting in this restaurant, the air thick with misery and an emotion she was well acquainted with: regret.

She wished with all her heart that it wasn’t true, that somewhere inside of her was someone more then this. Someone who didn’t look for cheap pleasure in her conquests, in the embrace that she hated and starved for. She loved it: the bittersweet glances, the way they looked at her with thirst in their eyes; but she wanted more. She wanted the moon, the stars, the earth, and not just the eyes that made them promise them. She wanted---what was it that she wanted? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she was tired of lying. Tired of coming and putting on a show to convince everyone with observant eyes.

She was tired, fatigued, exhausted. She was tired of fighting the lie that had become truth. She wanted to lie down and let consume her, make everything and anything she was not, and make her everything and anything she didn’t want to be. She wanted to know that what she had given up was not for nothing; that the man she loved would love her too: perhaps not in this time and place but in the next one; for Draco Malfoy was never one for urgency. She had never been so sure of anything in her life.

She had never been so frightened in her life either.

“Check please!” she called motioning for the waiter to come to the table. Rewarding him with a flirtatious smile and a flip of her red hair she wrote out a check, signing it Ginevra Weasley. She stood up and pushed the chair in and fingered the jacket absentmindedly. She closed her eyes and turned to walk out of the restaurant.

Pausing at the front door she turned to a uniformed man and pointed to her table. “Someone left their jacket there: perhaps you should look for some identification: I am sure whoever left it would like it back.”