He isn't totally sure how much detail John's gone into with Regan, nor how much he wants to go into himself, but it's good to have some sort of mutual baseline. He nods in return and pauses for a moment, trying to work out what to say and how to say it. The difficulty isn't just that the story is odd or frightening; it is also personal and painful. He wants to avoid it and doesn't know if he should trust that impulse; he feels obligated to confront it, and doesn't know if he should trust that, either.

"I've always been lonely," he says eventually, his expression as matter-of-fact as he can make it. "That made one of the, um..." He flounders a bit, his sign not good enough to word this with any nuance, and in the end he gives her an apologetic look as he digs out his phone and types it out: "One of those Entities from our world feeds off of loneliness, just like the one John and I sort of work for feeds off knowledge. And it was feeding off me for a while."

Once she's read this, he hesitates. He could just keep typing it out, but that feels both too difficult and like it would be rude, or lazy. He'd rather work on getting better at this, and the focus of just saying it is a better distraction than having to write it out, having to sit with it like that.

"So..." He pockets his phone again. "When I came here, that was still... happening. It was hard to stop."

So unbearably, painfully hard. He still thinks about it sometimes. He still has dreams. He still feels, on very few and very small occasions, the little wisps of cold fog chasing around the back of his neck.

"It made me feel like there were no other people in the world, sometimes," he says. "So, all this..." He gestures around them and then lets his hand fall, just staring at the empty streets for a while. Then he looks back at her. "It's hard."