Saturday morning found Claire Hivolt in the senior common room with a cup of tea she wasn't drinking and a piece of correspondence she'd read three times without absorbing.
The letter was from her mother — routine family business, nothing that required this much attention. But Claire had found, over the past week, that her attention kept drifting toward things that weren't routine, and the letter was simply what happened to be in her hands when the drifting occurred.
She was thinking about William.
This wasn't unusual. She had been thinking about William Cross, in varying capacities and with varying degrees of strategic intent, since the week he'd returned from his extended family visit looking like a different person had walked back into his own life. She had watched him win the individual combat bracket with the specific attention of someone who had been quietly, methodically assessing him for months and was now recalibrating that assessment in real time.
