Zelda's remark seemed more conciliatory than genuine, at least from his perspective. He felt as though Caroline and Zelda were teaming up to try and navigate their way out of this conversation as gracefully as possible — this conversation that he had thrust them all into without realizing that it was going to be a whole thing — and he felt rather humiliated by it. One thing that was clear was that none of them had made any progress towards the door, so his hopes of being left alone a minute to collect himself weren't likely to be realized. And he didn't know what to say. He didn't want Zelda to feel as though she had to explain herself or defend herself, so perhaps he could have said it's fine, except that his tongue felt too heavy to form the words properly. He'd already said it, anyway, and he hadn't sounded particularly convincing the first time. No reason to expect the second would be any better. He couldn't express any more complicated sentiment, though. Moving beyond the fact that he didn't feel physically capable of saying anything at all, he hadn't had enough time to untangle how he felt about this to have anything coherent to say. And Caroline was here, which meant he would have to censor anything that was too genuine. He liked her and so did Zelda, but that didn't mean she deserved to be thrust into the center of a conversation like this.

"I thought you'd be —" he started to say, but cut off when he realized this wasn't how he wanted to start at all. He didn't know how he did want to start, though, because he still didn't know what he was trying to actually say, and he had his hands in his pockets and he felt miserable and Zelda looked miserable.

"Nevermind." His cheeks were flushing. He decided abruptly that if they weren't going to leave the room he would, and headed back out into the hall without looking back at either woman.

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