The library was quiet around them. The ambient sounds of an academic space — pages, the occasional chair, Mrs. Ashford somewhere in the deeper stacks maintaining the silence.
William looked at Isolde.
The category the story had given him was villainness, which was a word that described function and not person, motivation and not character. It was a word for someone whose goals conflicted with the protagonist's goals in ways that were consequential.
But goals could change.
And protagonists could be wrong.
He was looking at a person who had said, in her second sentence to him, that she had disagreed with her family's intended response to an inquiry that ran through his father.
He was going to pay attention to what was actually there.
Then it happened.
