It's never that easy, no. You can promise everything, to everyone, and still wake up alone one day. Or you can watch the person you'd promised to stay with disappear, drowned, dead, vanished into the dark while you did everything you could to reach out and catch up. But he doesn't need to tell her that. Ange knows. He can tell, just by virtue of their time in both worlds.

You'd have to be heartless not to, or so isolated you had no connection to anyone.

He's taken a step closer, and taken a knee. She's not meeting his eye, so he won't ask her to. He'll just get more to her level, instead. Because he's so proud and so happy for her it feels like if he doesn't at least reach out, he's going to explode.

"I can tell," he says, very gently. As if to keep anyone nearby from accidentally hearing the little heart-to-heart. "I understand."

He remembers I'll work on my half. A greenhouse at the end of the world. Roses in a bowl. no matter what happens, no matter what I say, don't say... or can't say. I'm not going to lose you.

He understands very, very much.

"You know, at some point, I'll have to give one of you the 'shovel talk'," he says, after a long moment, in an attempt to lighten things up. Turn the talk away from Ange having to bare her feelings even more. "I hear that's something family members do."

Oh, whoops. Yeah, they're both basically family by now, as far as he's concerned.