Louise Laval listens with her eyes and answers with her hands. She marks conversations with the neat precision of a scribe and stores them in expressions that make room for humor even when the topic would prefer to be heavy. Where others chase noise, Louise watches intent. She greets the square's mastiff with a pause that says: we will decide courage together today. Children copy her fingers the way they copy birds, and she forgives their clumsy sentences with a smile that feels like a door being held open. Her world was never small, only translated; Elodie helped with the words, but Louise has always supplied the meaning.
Since her sister walked into fog, the village has tried to help and, as villages do, sometimes stumbled over good intentions. Some speak louder to her, as if volume could cross a river; some speak around her, as if grief were a garment she should not see. She navigates both with a grace learned in crowded rooms. At the House of Fate she traces the weave of charms with her fingertips and watches the thin flame of vigil candles until it steadies. She prefers tasks to pity. Give her a list, a knot to set, a bell to polish. Let her be necessary. Rowan notices that necessity turns faces toward her and away from their own fear, which is medicine for everyone involved.
She is not emblem or lesson. She is a person who wants her sister back and who has learned to hold more than one feeling without letting either spill: sorrow in one palm, expectation in the other. When villagers ask what they can do, she answers with a gesture toward the square as if to say: keep living near one another, so there is somewhere worth returning to. If the wood returns Elodie, Louise will be the first to make space for laughter in the shop again. If it does not, she will insist that kindness does not wait on good news.
Rowan records these things because records are a way to be faithful to people when power would prefer you faithful to outcomes. Louise is proof that attention is a form of strength. In the season of fog, strength like that is the sort the village can afford.
New information obtained during session 2
Louise was not directly mentioned in detail during Session 2, but remains linked by family ties and grief through Elodie's absence.