"She didn't say it to you about Scott. But believe me. She told Scott." His face softened when he saw the emotion starting to rise in Lydia's eyes. "I'm not going to sit here and assume she felt something that she never said she felt. I loved her. Manipulating the memory of someone after losing them to make them into the person you wanted them to be instead of the person they were... to me, that's unfair to Allison. I loved her the way that I remember her. I don't have to change her into someone who felt something else to know that I loved her. I can't do that to her, Lydia, I can't say that she felt a certain way just because it makes me feel better. That's not fair to her memory." And Isaac left it at that. Allison may have been Lydia's best friend and Isaac would always take Lydia's opinion to heart because of that when it came to the woman they both lost, but this situation was different. It was remarkably easy to stand there and convince yourself that someone was in love when you weren't the one they were supposedly in love with. Lydia's eye was more biased and less objective when it came to Allison, but to Isaac, it was practically black and white. Allison never told Lydia who she loved, so Lydia wouldn't know. She told Scott that she loved him, so she did. She never told Isaac. She never suggested it to Isaac. It would have been unrealistic and unfair to Allison to tell himself that she loved him after she had died. He tilted his head as he stared at her with sad eyes, moving a hand to brush a few loose strands of red hair behind Lydia's ear.
"There's nothing to be sorry about," he said firmly, already working to pull Lydia out of the hole she was falling into. "It would have been nice to hear but it doesn't change the person that she was and it doesn't change what she had done for me. Everything else is just - it doesn't matter, everything else is in my head and it's there because of the person that I am, Lydia, I can't stop it. I can't change it, I can't move forward, but that's my own fault. Don't get upset, Lydia." Isaac swiped his thumb across her cheek with a tired shake of his head, fingers returning to her shoulder to start draining away some of that ache once more. "It's not worth getting upset over, it's alright."