Lily's friendship had confused Peter when he was younger, but now that he was older again, it felt much more normal. Lily had been his friend back home, his sister-in-law. Therefore he would normally hesitate before talking to her about this particular problem, but this wasn't his Lily. This was a Lily who'd married Severus Snape, in a world where Peter hadn't married anyone (that he'd heard about, anyway), and a Lily that was stuck here without her husband but seemingly building a life here anyway.
And that... that was what Peter wanted. Somehow, without intending to, he had changed; he had gone from someone who flailed around without his ties to the family he was missing to someone who felt like maybe this was a chance at something different for him. A chance at independence. It didn't mean that he had been unhappy in his old life, but rather that he was just incredibly tired of being unhappy with the lack of it. His attachment to this place was completely inexplicable, but probably had to do with how much he'd learned about himself since being here. He didn't want to shed all of his old life, at all, but he didn't relish the idea of going back to what he'd come from immediately, either.
But there was a tiny little voice in his head telling him that this instinct, the desire for more than what his old life had offered him, might be the part of him that had caused him to turn his back on his friends before. What did it say about him that after only a few months without his wife, he'd already started to wonder whether they were still together? Yes, there were explanations for that which he'd come up with while he was drunk, but once the liquor had worn off, guilt had kicked in again.
He didn't want to hurt anyone. He just wanted to be happy. And he was exhausted, exhausted from worrying about what people thought of him and whether he would bother them or whether the way he behaved made him a bad person, in their eyes or his own. Time would probably make that easier, but he didn't want to carry this around for ages. He'd told Hestia he would start working on being alright as of Sunday night, and yet he'd made almost no progress since then.
It was his distracted search for his badge that made him a few minutes late. Once he found it, he left the dorm, took the steps down to the common room two at a time, and found Lily waiting for him there, pacing. "Hey," he said, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her and make her aware of his presence. "Are you alright?"