[The context is there, but... It is either shameful or not hers to say. She cannot bear to admit that despite all her talk of traitors and her hardline stance on accepting them again that she has hypocritically made an exception and demanded (practically begged) one of them to come back to Meridian (her). She cannot tell another man that Liem had called her his friend and demanded she fight to survive as a condition for his belief in Meriian, that he had wept in her arms.

So she says the parts she can more easily say.

She doesn't know why Claude's smile looks sad. (She doesn't know why she dislikes that he takes his hand off her shoulder.)]

... I have known Liem Talbott since I first was ripped to Horos.

[Did that explain it well enough? No, she knows that it doesn't. Her expression twists with frustration, struggling to be... anything close to open.]

He saw... what I'd done. In that space before hatching.

[Claude would remember. That strange field of space between worlds before they woke up in Horos, where their memories and pasts flickered and could be seen by anyone else. The place where they'd had to choose between the call of the shadows or the light. (He'd remember, too... the things she'd tried to throw in his face as proof that she was unlovable, that she had done things too unforgivable to deserve affection or any sort of normal relationship.)]

But he told me... that I had to keep moving. He waited for me.... He waited until I could choose the path of the light.

[And those words, that guidance, when she had wept and thought herself better of dead, the way he'd patiently stood there until she was able to believe him just enough to think that maybe she deserved more than the embrace of shadows and darkness...

Maybe that was care. Even if she hadn't wanted it. Even if he hadn't asked her to decide she owed him a debt.]