Partner work meant no escape.
Silver realized that truth the second Professor Dawes passed around the assignment sheets in their Victorian Literature seminar, her sensible heels clicking against the worn wooden floors of the classroom as she moved between the ancient desks. The Gothic windows cast long rectangles of pale afternoon light across the pages, illuminating neat columns of paired names that had been inked like judicial sentences.
The assignment was ambitious—a comparative analysis of industrial themes in Dickens and Gaskell that would require extensive research, multiple drafts, and countless hours of collaboration. Professor Dawes had explained it with the kind of enthusiasm that only tenured academics could muster for nineteenth-century social criticism, her voice carrying across the high-ceilinged room as she outlined expectations and deadlines.
