The question surprised him. It was the sort of question one expected, in a conversation like this, but the answer had been obvious to him for so long that it was strange to think it wasn't equally obvious to everyone. Sure, Ari Fisk didn't know him, but he knew more than most people did about his history with Zelda. He'd tried moving on, time and time again. After Ari's assault in the hospital supply closet, after the disaster at Passover, after months of frosty treatment from her family and no word at all from Zelda. He'd planned a trip to India to try and move on, because everything in England reminded him of her. Even so, time and time again, he found himself back here — not literally, of course, because he had never before made it into Ari Fisk's parlor, but metaphorically here, trying to piece together a way in which the two of them had a future.

"So much," he admitted, with a sorry sort of smile. "And she loves me, too. Though I never got the impression that counted for much, where your father was concerned."

Not that he'd had any conversations with Brannon Fisk about love. The impression was more one he'd inherited from Zelda, he supposed; that no one in her family trusted her to determine her own happiness, and that they all still thought her a child.