Alfred sighed at Evander's questions. Both of them were legitimate, and things that he had been concerned with long before Evander brought them up over the dinner table. The amount of time and energy he'd invested worrying about them already, though, did not mean he had any ready response to either.

"No, probably not," he answered wearily in response to the first. "But I'm not, either. Wise, that is." He'd tried to be, for a time. In the immediate aftermath of the disastrous passover visit, he'd put his nose to the grindstone and tried to save every sickle away so that he could afford to transform himself into a Presentable Future Husband. That, however, was a task that no amount of money was going to accomplish. He could have rented a house, or gone out and gotten well-tailored suits and a haircut, but he'd still be a sailor at the end of the day. And even if he went and found another career, like Evander sometimes mentioned, nothing was going to erase the whole potential cannibalism thing from the memory of the general public. He'd eventually realized that there was no amount of time or effort that would make him any more amenable a suitor in the eyes of most of Zelda's family, but he honestly wasn't sure whether she had realized that, yet. She'd said she didn't mind shocking or alienating them with their latest scheme, so long as she didn't cause a public scandal — but he worried that when it actually happened, or when her relationship with her father and siblings hadn't neatly knit itself back together in a matter of a few weeks, she would feel differently. She'd regret sticking with him, but it would be too late to go back and repair things.

"And..." he began uncomfortably, shifting to the second of Evander's questions. He fidgeted in his seat for a moment as he tried to consider what to say. "She's very good at what she does," he began diplomatically. When it had just been the Voyager's fate hanging in the balance, Alfred hadn't had a single reservation about leaving it in her capable hands. When it came to him, though, he recognized that Evander was right. "She's... well, it's not as though there's any other option," he pointed out. "It's not as though she'd ask to be reassigned, and let someone else handle it. And I can't just write to her boss and tell her we're —" here Alfred drew himself up short, not sure what to say. He opened his mouth once, twice, to try and find an appropriate word. Eventually what he settled on was to just recycle the word Evander had decided on earlier: "Close. That could ruin her career, or her reputation."