Alfred looked down at his feet as he walked and flushed again. He knew what he wanted to get across (at least in theory), but he still hadn't found a very good way to do it, and he had the sneaking suspicion that he'd regret whatever words he chose as soon as he started talking. There was also a huge mental hurdle to overcome in just starting the conversation, because he thought it was inevitable that he'd have to talk about Lily, and it still went against every instinct he had to willingly talk about his one-time fiancee with Zelda. She'd already read the book, though, so it wasn't as though he was breaking any news to her that she didn't already know. If anything, the book had made it all sound much worse than it really was, as far as how emotionally attached he was to the idea of their engagement.

"The — uhm, the girl from the book," he began, unable to actually look at Zelda as he spoke. "Before I left the last time, on the Sycorax, we'd — made all these plans." Plans, while not an inaccurate description, was perhaps putting matters a little lightly. "And set up all of these... expectations. And then when I didn't come back when I should have, it made things — a lot harder on her than they had to be," he continued. "And I didn't want to do anything like that again, this time. I didn't want to have someone... waiting on me, I suppose. With expectations," he glanced up at her here, to see whether she seemed to be following his explanation or not. "So there's — a lot of things I didn't say, before I left. And maybe if I had, things would have gone differently."