( She rolls with it as if blunt insensitive questions are in fact the easier thing; because, well, they are. She doesn’t mind. )

Of course they don’t stay the same, ( Astrid says, surprised. ) They’re gonna change and evolve. Mostly they do try to keep it the same, like, and the big important beats stay, but maybe some plant has died out so someone changes a reference on the fly to be some other flower people’d actually recognise and know the meaning of. Maybe there’s some sentence that’s really clunky so they rephrase it so it sounds better. It gets improved, it stays fresh. You keep it alive, keep it so’s it makes sense to the people listening. The world is always changing, so stories do too. Nothing stays the same forever.

And people change books too, don’t they? There’s such a thing as an edit-or.