Claire Ashby came back on a Tuesday.
Three days after the initial twenty minutes. Long enough for Seren to have read four of her previous pieces, assessed her methodology, identified the specific quality that made her work different from the kind he'd been wary of — she didn't build narratives around people so much as she let people build their own, then got out of the way.
He had decided.
He told her yes at nine-fifteen.
She had her recorder out by nine-twenty.
She was good at the job.
That was the thing Seren hadn't fully anticipated, even after reading her work. Reading a person's output and being in a room with them were different things, and Claire Ashby in a room had the specific, focused quality of someone who listened with their whole attention and knew when to speak and when to leave space.
She started with the framework.
