"I wanted to come," she said. "I wanted you. I wanted the secret, didn't I?"
"But I was no primal beast of the woods," he said, "I was no innocent hairy man of myth, I was Reuben Golding, the hunter, the killer, the Man Wolf."
"I know," she said. "And I loved you every step of the way to the knowledge of what you are, didn't I?"
"Yes." He sighed. "So what am I afraid of?"
"That you won't love the Morphenkind that I become," she said simply. "So you won't love me when I'm as powerful as you are."
He couldn't reply.
He sucked in his breath. "And Felix, and Thibault, do they know how to control when the full change happens?"
"No. They said it would be soon." She waited, and when he said nothing, she went on. "You're scared you won't love me anymore, that I won't be that tender, vulnerable pink thing that you found in this house."
He hated himself for not answering.
"You can't be happy for me, you can't be happy that I will share this with you, can you?"
"I'm trying," he said. "I really am, I'm trying."
"From the very first moment you loved me you were miserable that you couldn't share it with me, you know you were," she said. "We talked about it, and it was there when we didn't talk about it—the fact that I could die, and you couldn't give this gift to me for fear of killing me, the fact that I might never share it with you. We talked of that. We did."
"I know that, Laura. You've every right to be furious with me. To be disappointed. God knows, I disappoint people."
"No, you don't," she said. "Don't say those things. If you're talking about your mother and that dreadful Celeste, well, good, you disappoint them for being far more sensitive than they can guess, for not buying into their ruthless world with its greedy ambition and nauseating self-sacrifice. So what! Disappoint them."
"Hmmm," he whispered. "I've never heard you talk like that before."