His voice made her stop, and she looked back at him. Sitting alone on his stool, clinging to her coat, he was alarmingly vulnerable. It was an attitude she hated in others as much as she hated it in herself. But it wasn't his fault. And she knew well enough how often she'd been helped without realising it. She couldn't leave him.

"If you don't want me to help and you don't want me to go, what do you want?" she said, offering her hand to him in place of his grip on her coat.