You sat behind the reception desk, typing away at a spreadsheet while your iced coffee slowly melted beside you. The morning had been chaos. Three meetings. Two delivery drivers. One broken printer. And an elderly client who’d somehow managed to lock himself in the restroom.

Your phone had been abandoned face-down beside your keyboard for nearly an hour.

Which was unfortunate. Because approximately three thousand miles away, Mattheo Riddle was having what experts might classify as a crisis.

On the other side of the Atlantic, inside a dimly lit Slytherin common room, Mattheo sat slumped on a velvet sofa, phone clutched in both hands like a lifeline. His knee bounced. His jaw was tight. Pansy Parkinson observed from the armchair across from him, a book open in her lap that she hadn't turned a page of in ten minutes.