"Maybe Senior Sister Meilin should've come," Lauren whispered.
Kiki heard and whispered back, "She's trying to breakthrough, she couldn't leave."
Maria, meanwhile, had already been pulled in another direction by two market women and a cloth merchant who all apparently knew a great deal about somebody's cousin, somebody's lazy husband, and a marriage that should not have happened but did anyway.
"Wait, whose son ran off?" Maria asked with obvious interest.
"The butcher's second one!"
"Ah," Maria nodded wisely. "That doesn't surprise me. He always had weak will and wandering eyes."
The women cackled.
Donna looked between the two older women and thought, not for the first time, that the sect was held together by strangely different pillars. And one of them seemed very unreliable.
One inspired respect so naturally that people forgot she was still younger than most of them, and even her beauty garnered admiration without lust.
