Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  Some people might have found it distressing to know that their spouses were not in perfect accord with them when it came to the subject of their families. Meredyth Walsh was not such a person. She appreciated the semi aloof tone that Wyatt regularly adopted when he was forced to interact with her father. It was appropriate given the circumstances, and it wasn’t all that often that the two of them were on the same premises with each other (let alone in conversation). That Wyatt was only tolerant (never anything more) when it came to her sister was equally appropriate. There was one thing that she (if she was a completely different sort of person who found it necessary to discuss and defend her personal choices with anyone other than herself) would have made clear to any person that had expressed an interest. Meredyth had never had any reason to regret her decision to marry Wyatt -- never.

  If she had thought that that was a possibility, then she wouldn’t have married him in the first place. She was a practical person, after all, and there would have been no reason to enter into an arrangement that was liable to end badly. Practicalities aside (she should, perhaps, phrase it as practicalities included as that was likely a more accurate description), she and Wyatt fit. The two of them worked in a way that was marvelous to behold. She had known that they did, and she had known that they would. She had made her decisions in accordance with that knowledge.

  Meredyth was, however, not someone who had ever been inclined to cling to fairy tales. Reality was reality, and stories did not end with a life of no conflict stretching into infinity before you. That Wyatt was Wyatt and would do (upon occasion) Wyatt type things that would cause bumps in the smoothness of the life path that she was building had been always understood. She had walked into their marriage with eyes open and expecting, and Wyatt had done the same. She was even gracious enough to concede that there might be occasions when Wyatt being Wyatt might be momentarily frustrated when he didn’t understand why it was that Meredyth chose to proceed in the manner that she did. Such was life. Such was reality. Such was what a practical person expected when they went to the trouble of entering into an institution as serious as marriage.

  Those incidents didn’t change how dear Wyatt was to her. They didn’t change Wyatt’s ultimate respect for her judgment. They were simply the price one occasionally paid for the overwhelming convenience derived from turning two separate lives into one united existence. Marriage required sacrifices, and their fleeting and widely dispersed moments of eye rolling on both sides were theirs. It was hardly a devastating price to pay for all the gain that went with it.

  There was no place in their marriage where this difficulty in merging the two of them was more noticeable than when it came to Wyatt’s relationship with her sister or what would be more accurately defined as Wyatt’s understanding (or lack thereof) of Meredyth’s own relationship with her sister. Wyatt was often lost when it came to the decisions that Meredyth made involving Lia. He let it slide by most of the time, but Meredyth could see the confusion (and not a little bit of distress) written across his face when she made her decrees.

  Wyatt simply did not view the situation through the same lens that she did. He got taken by surprise when new developments arose, thus he spent a lot of time adjusting and readjusting to the situation instead of learning to see the bigger picture. Meredyth did not operate on the same wavelength. There was no need for her to adjust or readjust her thinking or her reactions to the situation. She was prepared for the situation. She was prepared for all the things about the situation that continually left Wyatt in his state of confusion. Nothing took her by surprise when it came to Lia because everything occurred exactly as she intended it to when it came to her younger sister.

  She knew what was coming. She knew how things would go. She knew what to expect. An excellent example would be the end of Lia’s time at boarding school. She and Wyatt had had words shortly before her sister’s graduation. He thought that things would go differently than she knew they would (and the dear man had been trying to prepare her for what he thought was going to be disappointment on her part). He needn’t have bothered (not that his desire to look out for her had not been noted and tolerantly smiled upon). She was not disappointed; she was not taken by surprise. Wyatt had been the one who had been unprepared for events as they unfolded.

  It had been nothing but expected by Meredyth the day that Lia had come home to her at the end of her formal secondary schooling. Wyatt had seemed to think that she might go running off to her ragtag little group of Connor followers. He had thought that she would choose them when presented with the option. Meredyth could have been insulted by his lack of appreciation for her judgment on the matter, but she gave him much leeway when it came to all things Lia. She could not fault his logic that there had been a time when Lia had chosen that path. Wyatt simply did not understand that that was then. This was now. They were two different matters entirely.

  He had thought that Lia would desire some sort of distance from Meredyth. He had mentioned something about resentment that Meredyth had really only half heard because she had been too busy indulging in eye rolling (internal only naturally) over how little Wyatt truly grasped about the situation in front of him. Meredyth, of course, knew better. There were a variety of reasons for that better understanding on her part.

  For one, Wyatt didn’t know that she had arranged for Lia to be mentally free of the possibility of feeling resentment. She admitted to herself that it had been a rather drastic step to take, but she had no qualms about having chosen to take it. She had been completely justified. The situation had required a sharp check to ensure that matters did not continue unabated. It was a necessary step to counter the over indulgence in having her own way that Lia had been granted previously. It was equally unnecessary to inform Wyatt that it had ever occurred because it simply did not concern him. Wyatt did not need to be bothered with items that did not concern him.

  In addition, Wyatt didn’t understand that she and Lia were in accord that there was no reason for any “deep-seated resentment” about the situation (or however it was that Wyatt had phrased it at the time). Lia understood that Meredyth had stepped in and saved her from a series of unfortunate connections. She understood that she had been dealing with untrustworthy people who hadn’t had her best interests at heart. Such an understanding did not leave itself open to resentment of the person who had corrected the problem; there was room for nothing but gratitude there. Meredyth didn’t need to discuss it with Lia to know that Lia was in agreement with her on that conclusion. It was the only sensible manner in which Lia could view the situation, and she had granted Lia plenty of time and the proper surroundings to come around to being sensible.

  That Lia would be sensible was one of those things that Meredyth expected and did not find it necessary to explain. That Lia came home without comment just proved Meredyth correct on the matter (not that she had doubted, but she freely admitted that occasional disturbances cropped up in the course of things i.e. the one that had led to her having to take Lia’s situation so pointedly in hand in the first place). The point was that (contrary to what Wyatt or anyone else may have conjectured on the topic) Lia was exactly where she belonged (home with her sister and in a proper frame of mind).

  Meredyth had always known that this was the way that things would come to be in the end. There weren’t any other options. Any path that didn’t end with her sister firmly entrenched on her side was a path that hadn’t actually reached its ending. Lia was meant to be on her side. Lia had to be on her side. Wyatt’s questions (quickly ended) were without merit, but she couldn’t find it in herself to blame him for his thoughts. Wyatt, dear as he was, was not in a position to understand her relationship with Lia. He had access to neither the details nor her thought processes on the matter. She did not choose to attempt to enlighten him. It was unnecessary. It didn’t involve him.

  Lia was hers. That was the summation and the expla
nation and the rationale for all. It was beyond the ability of outsiders to comprehend, and they needn’t waste time in the attempt. When it came to Lia, Wyatt was an outsider. He always would be. Everyone always would be. She and Lia were a separate institution to all the rest of her life, and they would always remain so. That was a decision that had been set in stone while Lia was still in infancy.

  What was it that old woman who had run the household in the months after their mother’s death had said? It was that the two of them were bound together by an unfortunate tragedy and should be closer than regular siblings in response. Meredyth rolled her eyes (in the actual physical sense) at the memory. She had ensured that her father had sent the woman packing in short order. She had had no desire to allow her sister to be exposed to such half-thought out, sentimental nonsense. They weren’t bound by an unfortunate tragedy.

  In the first place, it wasn’t an unfortunate tragedy. It was insulting to everyone’s intelligence to refer to it as such, and it provided cover for people to make themselves feel better about their lack of action. It was the result of the allowance of a series of poorly made decisions.

  Secondly, they weren’t bound together by any tragedy at all. They were bound together by the fact that Meredyth had interceded in Lia’s life to fix other people’s mistakes. It was Meredyth’s actions that tied them together. It was Meredyth’s decisions that mattered. There was no mystical, outside influence that had placed them upon the path to meet their fate. It was all Meredyth, and it was all of her own choosing. Lia was hers, Meredyth’s, first occasion upon which she had set her will and her thoughts and her opinions and her actions in contrast to the cluttered chaos of the life in which she had dwelt and come out victorious.

  Grandiose sounding or not, the fact of the matter was that Lia was the first time that Meredyth had changed the world. It was only fitting that she would be present and approving as Meredyth turned that small step start into the fully realized, large scale ambition that it had become. Even though Meredyth had fully expected Lia’s willing return to the fold, she wasn’t foolish (despite the unvoiced thoughts on the matter that she could see flitting in and out of her husband’s expressions). She had watched carefully. She had paid attention, and she was confident in the fact that her sister had no secrets from her.

  The newly acquired habit of typing away on her netbook during down moments was occasionally annoying (her typing was really quite unnecessarily loud in Meredyth’s opinion), but there was nothing of concern in the acquisition of a creative writing hobby. The girl had been forever shoving what she was writing under Meredyth’s nose in a quest to receive a literary analysis, and Meredyth had read enough to have done some wondering about what type of long term hallucinogenic effects the combination of medications that Lia had been under might have -- a career as a novelist was not going to be a part of her sister’s future. There was, however, nothing threatening to the rebuilt status quo of their relationship in Lia’s developed addiction to being in front of a computer screen.

  There was, in fact, a vast deal of benefit to it (all wasted time spent trying to formulate a suitable response to Lia’s incessant demands of “what do you think of this story” aside). Meredyth owed a great deal of time gain to the affinity that her sister seemed to have for filling in the missing gaps in her own version of Anna McKee’s ability to predict human behavior. Whether it was because she had spent time with the woman herself (and thus held some sort of otherwise unattainable insight into the way she worked through problems) or there was some sort of connection between the way the program operated and the strange, jumbled topic variation manner in which Lia wrote her stories, Meredyth neither knew nor cared.

  The end result (and Meredyth was far too focused on the end result to be over much concerned with the method one used to obtain it) was that while those Meredyth had employed (experts and supposedly brilliant and highly recommended as they all had been) to piece together the unfinished product that she had obtained and turn it into what it was intended to be had made slow gains by inches, Lia made great leaps of miles. She did it better, she did it faster, and she did it without wasting Meredyth’s time with explanations of why it wasn’t moving along at a better rate than it was. Lia had taken little more than five weeks to reach a level of efficiency that her project head had told her they were still eighteen months away from getting.

  Whatever the x factor to the program that had been Anna McKee’s ace in the hole that had continually eluded Meredyth’s team might have been, Lia clearly understood it. The fact that she couldn’t seem to articulate to the rest of the group how she was doing what she was doing was, in Meredyth’s opinion, a bonus. She had happened upon that little unauthorized question and answer session and shut it down without fanfare.

  There was no reason to spread the knowledge further. There was no reason for those who had been involved to take a full understanding of how to recreate it with them if they left Meredyth’s employ if she could get around it. It might very well save her the trouble of having to have a potential threat neutralized at a later date. Those snooty members of the project team who were huffing and griping over being beaten out by an eighteen year old with no formal training and whining about how all she was doing was really not truly helpful because she wasn’t creating any means by which the others could follow her lead were going to end up owing the fact that their lives as professionals continued (or, circumstances demanding, their lives at all) on the fact that Lia had managed to cut them out of the process.

  It was ironic, and Meredyth enjoyed the irony. She did not, however, enjoy being in the front row audience for viewing their childish venting. That had been easy enough to remedy. The project team was broken up and dispersed. Each member had specific applications that they worked on in isolation from the others (there was no reason for them to be putting separate pieces together any longer). Lia was safely ensconced at an out of the way property (and Wyatt had wondered what she would ever need a small country estate for) where she could work without interruption. It was all quite satisfactory.

  If Wyatt still grumbled under his breath a bit over the way she let Lia go on, then it hardly mattered. He refrained from indulging in open questioning, and he did as asked when asked. That included staying out with Lia when she deemed it necessary. It wasn’t that Lia couldn’t stay alone, and it wasn’t as if there wasn’t a security team in place. She did, and there was. It was simply that Meredyth liked to take any and all necessary precautions. Connor had gone after her sister previously, and she didn’t consider it beyond him to try again if things got desperate for him. With the improvements that Lia was making to Glimpse allowing Meredyth to step up her plans at such a splendid rate, Connor was likely to be feeling desperate. It shouldn’t be obvious where Lia was located, but Connor wasn’t entirely without resources.

  Whenever Meredyth thought she might be seeing signs that someone was looking into the ownership of the house where Lia was living, she made certain that someone besides the regular security personnel was present for a few days. If Connor did try anything, then she had no intention of Lia being left alone to deal with it. She didn’t need to be bothered with reminders of her previous mistakes. Meredyth would fix that for her like she had handled everything else to do with that period of time where Lia had been operating under her lapse of judgment.

  She couldn’t reschedule her trip when the latest round of inquiries had put her on alert. There was something different about this time. Previous occasions had involved Meredyth being informed of subtle probing. Those could have been anything from an interested buyer to the never ending press interest in all things to do with her father’s position. This time there had been a decided lack of subtle. Someone had been poking around altogether ineptly, and Meredyth wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was enough to put her on alert and to cause her a little bit of disgust at the current lack of flexibility in her plans. Wyatt had been available to spend
some time out at the house with Lia, however, so off he had gone.

  She appreciated the fact that he didn’t ask questions despite his lack of enjoyment of both Lia and the country. It was just another of those ways in which Wyatt was dependably loyal. If she was a woman who did warm and fuzzy, then thinking of Wyatt’s loyalty would put her on that track. She didn’t do warm and fuzzy, but she loved that about Wyatt just the same. Wyatt would handle anything that came up during his stay out there, and she could focus on doing what was technically part of her job description in the position that she still held for Wyatt’s parents’ company. That it overlapped with a potential alliance she wanted to cultivate to further her and Wyatt’s own personal goals was yet another reason to not put off her trip.

  There would likely be nothing to handle anyway. The overt manner in which someone had been digging really didn’t seem consistent with Connor’s standards, so it was far more likely to be something else entirely. It could be nothing at all. It could be some amateurish tabloid journalist or photographer who was trying to get something to break into a sales relationship with one of the usual publishers (an experienced person from one of those type of magazines would have been far more stealthy). Wyatt would have no trouble dealing with someone looking for photos. He wouldn’t even have to -- the security team would dispense with them before Wyatt or Lia was even aware that someone was on the property. Wyatt’s presence was just a backup precaution.

  Meredyth didn’t like to be caught off guard, and if Connor was going to be that careless, then Wyatt had things he had been keeping bottled up for a while that he would like to say to the other man. Meredyth wasn’t about to deny him the opportunity. Such a move on Connor’s part would be a clear demonstration that she had moved so far out of his league that he could no longer serve as elementary of a purpose as keeping her from getting complacent. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have a convenient cover story of a disgruntled ex with stalkerish tendencies ready to roll whenever she deemed it necessary. Connor getting caught breaking into Meredyth’s home would be an excellent time to launch that. If Wyatt got to give the other man a black eye in the process, then it would be a simple case of her husband confronting an intruder. It would let Wyatt work off some of that pent up aggression he always seemed to carry around when it came to Connor. While she would be sorry to completely lose Connor as an adversary when she had no desire to lose her edge, she wouldn’t be sorry to see him with said black eye after the way he had so heartlessly used Lia in an attempt to get to her.

  Despite his intentions, that too had worked out in her favor. She was willing to concede that Lia wouldn’t have been nearly as useful without her exposure to Anna McKee, but that concession didn’t eliminate Connor’s guilt in going out of bounds in his futile attempt to stop her from getting what she wanted. She, however, was not going to waste time thinking about Connor right now. She would be using her time better if she was working on some preliminary outlines of various ways to deflect attention from (and cover up as needed) Wyatt’s new predilection. She had given him some very clear guidelines to follow, and they had gone through all the different mechanisms that were available to law enforcement for determining a person’s whereabouts.

  She thought he would adhere to them as agreed upon, but accidents did happen. She couldn’t expect Wyatt to be prepared for all contingencies; that was her part of their partnership. She would never be a loudly cheering fan of Wyatt’s methods, but she would be supportive in making certain that there was no undue fallout. She preferred subtler methods herself. There was, after all, something deeply satisfying about completely demolishing someone’s life when they crossed you. There was an art form to taking someone (even a completely previously respectable someone) and turning them into someone who had lost all credibility and was so mired in their own seemingly never ending set of problems that they had no time nor inclination to start hurling around accusations (not to mention the fact that no one in any position to matter would have listened if they did).

  Wyatt’s method lacked subtlety. It was blunt and not nearly as personal, but she couldn’t deny that it was equally effective (and rather quicker to accomplish). That was one of those differences between the two of them in how they viewed situations. Wyatt saw a problem and desired to end it. Meredyth saw a problem and desired to beat it. Both methods ended with no more problem, so Meredyth was willing to let Wyatt have his way when certain prerequisites were met.

  She couldn’t, after all, put the amount of effort required by her method of dealing into everyone that put themselves in her way. There were times when Wyatt’s way was self-evidently easier. While she would never advocate easier simply for the sake of easier, she did have to have her priorities. When such situations arose, Wyatt knew that he had her blessing. When Meredyth’s finesse served to curtail the threat best, Wyatt conceded to her expertise. It worked. It was beautiful to be a part of such perfection.