Before he spoke, Graham took a moment, head slightly bowed in reverence as he breathed out. He lifted a flat palm of his hand in front of him, pressed his other fist into it softly, and folded the fingers of that first hand around it. Another exhale and he dropped his hands, blinking up from his little...prayer? Mudra? Sign of respect? He wasn't sure exactly what to call it, but he looked up from it with a nod and a distant smile, sent a nervous sort of sputtering look over toward Arden, but then focused back on Kreila.

"I don't know," he admitted, "if I've ever really been in a situation where I didn't have a choice, but I'm sure I will, one day. I have been in situations where the choices I was making were being..." His throat tightened, and he swallowed it roughly down before continuing, "...influenced without me really knowing or realizing it....until it was too late. And had I known, I'd have made very different choices, I think, and things would...well, they'd be..." He rubbed the back his hand under a nose getting a little sniffling, "better. Sometimes, I think we think we're making the right choice, but it isn't always, so when you mess it up, you have another choice, to try and make it better. Or at least better next time, and to learn from it, and to be better about knowing what might be behind the choices we have that we can't see...and how they might be your choices, but they don't only affect you..."

Another hard lump, another failed attempt to swallow it down, and his eyes had drifted downward as he spoke, but then they lifted up again hopefully.

"You know?"