Of what kind, she wasn't sure -- but her expression didn't change in the face of it, though perhaps her heart did an odd spin in her chest. She regarded Evan with easy calm, gaze steady; for as long as he had anything to say, she let him speak, even turning to look at the woman with heavy eyes. Not everything is life, Eloise.
After a long beat she turned back to him, as if to be sure he understood she was listening.
"We're thinking of two different kinds of life," she told him finally, unperturbed. "I... Can't assign it the same meaning I think that you do. I have to think of life as something simple -- you're alive or you're not. A biological cycle."
Ellie wet her lips, looking away from him again -- at the woman. "If I think of life in the way I think you mean -- really having life inside of you, feeling alive -- I run into questions that make it difficult. Difficult to function in the way I have to."
To keep myself alive.
That was the truth, so she said it out loud: "To keep myself alive."
She glanced at him again, but lowered her eyes carefully a moment later. "But I understand you. I've been dead, too." In a way.