This was almost worse than her thinking he was insane. Luke was not interested in her pity, and that was what this felt like.

"I'm a hermit, not a child," he said, a little too peevishly. "I didn't come here to swim or learn new hobbies." He'd come here to die. And to avoid anyone else having to.

The truth--though he was scarcely self-aware enough to know this for himself--was that he had come here under a cloud of such despair that he had simply been surviving. His soul had not been ready to take in anything else, and while he had not been able to die, living was hardly what he'd been doing, either.