[The answer seems so obvious to him that the question almost becomes rhetorical.]

I was a coward--

[He chokes it out like a confession – urgently, despairing. It's the first time he has talked about Ed, about the pain trying it's very hardest to close his throat, and it already feels like a mistake. He sucks down a watery breath.]

I was... so afraid I would lose him again, after him and his librarian, that I -- [his eyebrows pinch together] -- I couldn’t.

[He closes his eye, wanting to escape himself, to claw out of his skin. And in that darkness, he conjures Ed's face. Not that vacant stare, the one that has burned itself into the inside of Oswald’s eyelids, but his sunny smile. Big and broad, all those teeth showing. What had he said to make Ed so happy? He fumbles to place it, to pin down the memory before it can slip away from him like smoke through his fingers, struggling with the idea that he might have only just imagined it. That the smile was never meant for him. He can’t say for sure, and shakes his head again, unable to speak. His heart hurts, ballooning against his ribs.]