She was telling him what he already knew - but it was difficult to hear the raw, terrified emotion in her voice as she shared it. Severus was all but emotionally stunted himself, almost crippled. He never knew the right thing to do, the right way to respond. In this case, he rested his free hand over her much smaller one where it rested on his arm, squeezing her delicate little fingers with his own.
When she asked her fateful question, the one thing he'd determined not to be the one to tell her, he actually hissed in a sharp breath, his fingers tightening convulsively over hers.
There was a small, ordinary stone bench nearby. He guided her to it - it would be quite picturesque someday when the garden had grown - and sat beside her, turning slightly to face her. He held both of her hands in his own and peered intently into her blue, blue eyes that were so familiar to him.
"Arianna," he said, almost a whisper. "Why do you think I would know such a thing?"
He did, of course, but she couldn't know that - could she?
"I didn't even know of your existence until a few months before my own death. Why do you want to know?"