Liberty's strongest urge was to comfort him, but when he didn't do so much as turn around, she took a step back. She wanted to be there for him, but not if he felt it was intruding. She stood, and listened, and the fact of it was that his words mirrored her own fears, and so Liberty didn't have the answers. And how she hated that she didn't have the answers!
It wasn't the life any of them wanted, she thought, but she wasn't going to put that on him either, because it was one thing to fear that something might happen, and quite another to know that it would.
'I'm sorry,' she said eventually, quietly. 'I am. Of course it isn't what you wanted.' She paused, and reached up to push her hair back from her face. 'The only glimpse of light is that you'll go back someday, isn't it? Even if it takes ten years. You'll go back where you should be, and maybe…maybe what you learn here will help you there. And you'll have those years over again.'
It had its own problems. Perhaps not as much for Alexander as for Philip, who would go from being nineteen to nine again. Or Liberty herself, which went some way to explaining her desperation to find Rica in the conventional way, so that she could keep her son with her, and not have it seem as though he never existed. But for Alexander, perhaps the thought would be a comforting one.