"Well," Alfred said hesitantly, wondering how much he ought to say here. It was not entirely accurate to say that he'd tried to marry her, after all, but it wasn't entirely inaccurate, either. The only thing he had formally done was ask to court her, and been soundly rebuffed. He'd been willing to marry her on several occasions, once out of a sense of honor and obligation (if there had been trouble, as they'd put it, in the wake of their night together before his departure for the Avalon expedition), and more recently out of genuine affection, but he wasn't sure whether he'd ever actually come out and said so explicitly, to either her or anyone else. Had he mentioned it to Ari Fisk during the hospital closet confrontation? He couldn't remember, but it hardly mattered now. He didn't want to explain to Evander that he'd been prepared to run off to some foreign country with Zelda in order to avoid her family, and he certainly wasn't going to bring up anything about the night in his cabin, or the aftermath of it.

"I asked to court her, anyway," he explained awkwardly. "Which is as far as it got, since her father said no. About a year ago. I, uh... well, her whole family is Jewish, and I guess I managed to accidentally pick some Jewish holiday to stop by her house on, and her whole family was there. It was murder," he continued with a flush. "So they don't... particularly like me, any of them. And there's a million of them," he complained. "She has, no joke, ten siblings. And they were all there. I'm lucky the damned Minister of Magic wasn't there, too."

Honestly, Alfred had made a good deal of mistakes over the course of his relationship with Zelda, but he still didn't think he'd done anything to deserve that. Having an audience while asking for something you desperately wanted was one thing; having an audience while someone you had never met rejected that request was something else entirely.

"But, uh... yeah, we're still... close," he said, with some difficulty. Again, he wasn't sure how much to divulge, here. If they went through with this plan to announce a courtship without warning, Evander would probably think he'd been intentionally obfuscating if he didn't admit to at least some sort of plan, but he couldn't just lay it out. "I, uhm," he continued awkwardly, "I might try again someday. Maybe."