Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  Wyatt Walsh was a reasonable man with a reasonable wife (other people might not see it that way, but Wyatt had never been much for caring or even paying attention to what other people thought about things). That their practicality in their approaches to their lives was a part of their original attraction to each other was openly acknowledged between the two of them. There was no pretense between the two of them that required some sort of poetical nonsense about rainbows and music and love falling out of the sky for no apparent reason. That was all ridiculous, and his wife shared his opinion.

  They shared most of the things that mattered. He knew good and well that he had made what his mother had once termed “a very good match.” His wife was nothing short of amazing. She was bright and talented and driven and understood the concept that necessity was necessity. There was no reason to complicate it with outside infringement via social norms. They understood each other, they worked well together, and they were, above all, practical in the manner in which they went about accomplishing their goals. The fact that they had common goals and were driven to make them come to be was yet another bit of the wonderful that defined their relationship.

  It was a well-ordered march ever forward on their chosen path for the two of them. They did what needed to be done when it needed doing to make what needed to happen happen. Sometimes, he had the urge to just sit back for a moment and contemplate the beauty of how it all (how they) fit together so well. That was as inclined to poetry as Wyatt Walsh ever came. Practicality defined their lives together, and it was a shame (in his opinion, when he thought of the matter at all) that more people didn’t embrace the concept that things in their lives should make sense more fully. It certainly worked for them. They were reasonable people with one solitary exception.

  Meredyth never saw reason when it came to her sister. All things Lia existed in some sort of black hole where nothing else penetrated -- even his wife’s ordinarily impressive sense of logic. It was the only blind spot that she had. That wasn’t, by the way, actually a complaint. It was just an observation that Wyatt had made. He figured that everyone who decided to try to live with another person day in and day out found some sort of odd thing about them no matter how otherwise reasonable they might be.

  He could name off a few of his own that Meredyth dealt with on a regular basis. It did, however, seem a kind of random area for her to have a blind spot in to him. He didn’t understand the attraction of the weakness himself. She was just a sibling. Siblings weren’t anything particularly special in his opinion. They were just people that had always been around that you had some sort of societal expectation that you were supposed to exhibit some sort of care for simply because they had always been around. What was the sense in that?

  He would tell you that there wasn’t any. It wasn’t sensible. It wasn’t practical. No reasonable person expected you to go out of your way for other people just because they had always been around. Why should you pretend to like people just because they were there? You didn’t like people just because they were there. Liking people was a complicated business. It involved who you were and who they were and how that all blended together. Trying to force it was just a waste of time. Pretending that siblings were some sort of special case that made all the practical reasons for liking a person fly out of the window was a waste of both time and effort.

  He certainly saw no reason to like his own brother. Will wasn’t much in the way of likable as far as Wyatt could tell. Their parents seemed to like him fine, but it was his observation that his parents were far too apt to like people in general. It was an annoying trait on their parts. It was his firm belief that you should exercise discretion when applying the concept of liking. Tolerance was, naturally, different. There was plenty of room to tolerate people that you didn’t like. You had to do that. Some people were useful, and you tolerated them because of their usefulness. That had nothing to do with liking. Use trumped liking, and liking wasn’t required for use. (He even managed to tolerate Will for short durations when it served the useful purpose of keeping his mother happy.)

  Meredyth was usually right there with him. She was mostly practical about the fact that most people weren’t meant to be liked. Liking was the exception and not the rule. For Meredyth, Lia was an exception to the exception. Meredyth was never practical when it came to Lia for reasons that she never cared to share with him. She never shared much when it came to Lia -- not unless she was having a weak moment, and his Meredyth was not prone to having weak moments. Meredyth insisted on liking Lia despite the fact that there was no logical reason for Lia to be liked (by Meredyth anyway).

  He, himself, could have liked Lia under different circumstances. That would be for the same reason that he liked his own parents; they took care of their own. Lia was like that. He saw that (even if Meredyth didn’t seem to understand the implications of it). He didn’t like Lia despite that fact because he didn’t trust her. Lia was the type that took care of her own, but he didn’t think she included Meredyth in that to be taken care of set. Meredyth would always come first for him, so he and Lia were on opposing sides despite an on again/off again attempt at a truce.

  One, he would be quick to point out if he had anyone to discuss such things with (which he did not), that he only kept working at because it seemed to make Meredyth pleased (not happy because happy was never a proper descriptive term for Meredyth when Lia and Wyatt were in the same room which was another of those things that she never bothered to explain for him) when the two of them were being civil. He could do (and did) civil. That was another thing that most people didn’t seem to understand -- that you could respect people and not like them at the same time.

  That’s where he stood with Lia, and he suspected that she felt similarly about him. That didn’t matter. She couldn’t be trusted. He didn’t care how helpful she had made herself working on Meredyth’s projects. He didn’t care if she managed to give Meredyth a warning that allowed her to block some sort of detrimental move that Ridley had been making just in the nick of time. What he did care about was the fact that Meredyth had used that as justification to give her sister pretty much free rein when it came to that computer program they needed to keep Meredyth’s plans moving in the right direction.

  That wasn’t reasonable. Lia had been using whatever leverage she could get her hands on to get herself to that point, and that meant that there was some reason that she wanted to be let loose on it without supervision. If that didn’t scream untrustworthy, then he sure didn’t know what did. Meredyth couldn’t or wouldn’t see it, and maybe he was imaging things (not that he thought he was prone to much imagination). She always dismissed his suggestions. She always brushed off his warnings. None of that, however, changed the fact that she relied on him to handle things when she couldn’t be present to do it herself.

  Now he had to deal with his brother’s whatever she was on top of everything else. She was a little difficult to place on first impressions. She was a lot mouthier than he had expected in a woman Will was involved with, but he didn’t intend to dig too deeply. His brother’s taste in female company was not making his list of things to spend his free time wondering about. He was only concerned with mitigating the fallout from her showing up somewhere she had no business being. If he was absolutely sure that it couldn’t come back to bite them, then he would take her out to the woods somewhere and end the issue. He might have cringed at the thought at one point in his life, but he couldn’t really remember that time any more.

  He was a man who fixed things, and under the right circumstances, that would be a fix. There were, however, other considerations. He had learned to stop and think before rushing in -- he owed that restraint to Meredyth. She had enough to juggle without having to stop and clean up anything for him. The woman had made way too many calls on her cell phone for her not to trace to the area, and they didn’t need anybody sniffing around even if they coul
dn’t ever prove anything. It was so much easier to deal with threats that wouldn’t have anybody looking for them.

  Meredyth, he knew, didn’t expressly approve of his methods, but she understood when necessary was necessary. She stayed out of his way when he handled what needed to be done. She never questioned why he handled the “dirty work” himself. It went without saying between the two of them that you didn’t trust others with what you could get done yourself. He hadn’t bothered her yet with the fact that what’s her name had gotten busted skulking around the house. He would tell her -- later -- when she was actually here herself instead of off making an appearance at one of her father’s never ending campaign events in the midst of her traveling for WIS purposes.

  He knew why she bothered. You needed access to useful people sometimes, but he was glad that his father-in-law never pushed for him to come along. He didn’t care to be around the man. He didn’t like him, he didn’t respect him, and he wasn’t very useful on his own (connections to connections kind of useful was a different matter, but he was happy to let that fall to Meredyth). Senator Lawson wasn’t much in the way of a father, and Wyatt never had had much patience for parents who couldn’t be bothered to look after their children. Besides, there was something about the way that man interacted (or didn’t) with his younger daughter that just flat out gave Wyatt the creeps.

  If you didn’t like someone, then you didn’t like them. That was one of Wyatt’s rules to live by, but the way that man sort of looked through her as if she wasn’t really standing there right in front of him was downright unnerving. Wyatt didn’t care much for being unnerved -- which was yet another reason to not care for the way Will’s woman had popped up in the middle of this house as if she owned the place. He should have let security shoot her first and ask questions later. They could have spun some sort of a story about an unidentified intruder and a tragic mistake.

  Sadly, it was too late for that now. The security team assigned to the house worked in shifts of two. When both of them arrived to give you a message at the same time, it was pretty much a given that they were going to be telling you something that you didn’t want to hear. He definitely hadn’t wanted to hear that what’s her name . . . Katelynn, Carson, Karen? Was it Karen? He thought it must have been Karen. He hadn’t wanted to hear that she had been gone for no one knew how long before anyone had noticed. He certainly hadn’t been keeping her company, and security had been relying on the cameras that had apparently suffered some sort of damage that left them all showing a picture from four hours ago.

  He hadn’t even gotten a chance to rake them thoroughly over the coals before his wife had called to check in on things. He had lied to Meredyth. He had never lied to Meredyth before -- not really. He had calmly and collectedly told her that everything was fine when he knew good and well that it wasn’t. He had lied to Meredyth, and he had done it without her suspecting a thing. He hadn’t realized that he was capable of such a thing. Granted, he had never had a reason to lie to Meredyth before. This was different. He needed time to think. He needed time to figure out how best to deal with this situation. Karen was gone. He didn’t know how much she may or may not have seen. While his first instinct had been to eliminate the potential threat and ask questions later, he had enough clarity to realize that that could have caused even more problems.

  It didn’t really matter -- not in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t like Karen was in any position to give out information in any manner that could hurt them. She could try, but she would be quickly silenced. Nobody beat Meredyth when it came to the public relations/believability game. The only people Karen could go to with anything that she may have found (and it was still a may, she might not have seen anything at all) were people who already knew (or at least suspected) anything that she could now confirm for them. That was one part of this back and forth with Connor Ridley that Wyatt had never grasped. It wasn’t like Meredyth didn’t know that Ridley was out to stop her from doing all of the things that she was trying to do. It wasn’t like Ridley didn’t know that Meredyth knew that he was trying to stop her. Why they kept some sort of a premise going that it was all secretive was beyond him.

  It was sort of a pointless waste of effort. It wasn’t like Ridley was going public with anything. He couldn’t. He had speculations. Even if he had proof, it wouldn’t do him any good. Meredyth always won the public relations game -- always. Karen was an annoyance, but it was hardly tragic. It didn’t matter what she knew or what she thought she knew. If Ridley or Will didn’t have the clout to cause real problems for Meredyth, then some hospital nurse with no family name to speak of sure wasn’t going to be causing any problems. Karen Howell (he checked the file security had presented him with once again for the name) wasn’t going to do anything.

  He had curbed his irritation with security and thanked them for getting the information for him. He had even done a top notch job of playing off the whole thing. It was all fine. It was just his brother’s girlfriend who had claimed that she wanted to see him about some family matter. She had snuck in because he and his brother weren’t on the best of terms, and she hadn’t thought he would see her. Weren’t women ridiculous when they thought they were being helpful -- he had added while the security guards smirked and nodded along with him. Of course, it had been necessary to check that she was what she said she was and not actually some tabloid reporter trying to get a look at their new home. Etcetera, etcetera. They needed to make sure whatever had happened to the cameras didn’t happen again and tighten things up because it might not be innocuous the next time. Mrs. Walsh valued her privacy, and they were there to make sure that she got it. Blah, blah, blah.

  They paid the security staff good money, but they still tried to avoid giving them any reason to ask questions -- not that the people that Meredyth hired were the question asking type. He wasn’t even sure what all he had said on the matter. He thought he might have implied that he had already confirmed that Karen was exactly what she said she was and sent her on her way having forgotten to alert them that the situation was over. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care. He was more concerned with how exactly he was going to enlighten Meredyth. He hadn’t decided that yet on the next day when she was on the phone again sounding harried and saying something that he didn’t quite catch before she had hung up again.

  There was some sort of a problem with one of the people who was working on Glimpse or with the equipment they were using to work on Glimpse or something like that. All he really got out of the conversation was that she was cutting her trip short to go oversee it personally. That meant it was serious, but he was sure that she would have it settled in short order. It wasn’t like it wasn’t all spread out over five locations. If there was a problem with one, then they had others.

  Besides, Meredyth had managed to get it in the first place when there wasn’t supposed to have been a way to do it. He was sure she would have it all well in hand until two hours later when it was clear that she didn’t. She didn’t sound harried in that phone call. She sounded calm -- not normal Meredyth calm. She sounded the deadened, unnaturally calm that portended something major occurring. All the project locations had suffered some sort of meltdown. She hadn’t elaborated; she had merely issued instructions. He was to make sure that the project room was locked down. Nothing was to be turned on, nothing was to be worked on, and Lia was not to go near any of it. She was already on her way, and she would be there within two hours.

  He didn’t know exactly what was going on, but he was hardly stupid. If things Lia had had her hands on were suddenly crashing and burning for no apparent reason when they had never displayed any inclination to do so before Lia had gotten hold of them, then what could be more obvious than the fact that Lia was the factor in the situation that had changed? It made plenty of sense to him. The fact that Lia looked as if she was fully expecting him to come crashing into the room when he got there was all the
confirmation that he needed.

  The fact that she looked pleased as all get out as she stared at the scrolling error messages on the screen in front of her was an additional confirmation despite the fact that none was needed. He hovered in the doorway for a moment staring at the girl his wife insisted on keeping in their lives despite any and all evidence that she couldn’t be trusted. She had used Meredyth. She had played Meredyth. She had taken his wife’s one blind spot and twisted it against them to use to her advantage. He didn’t know exactly what she had done, and he neither knew nor cared exactly how she had done it. None of that mattered. It only mattered that she had betrayed them. She had destroyed something that Meredyth had poured time and effort into, and she was sitting there looking nothing but pleased about it all.

  Meredyth was going to be devastated, and a devastated Meredyth was something that Wyatt didn’t want to contemplate. His breathing grew more labored and spots of color floated at random points in front of his vision. Who knew that the words “so angry he couldn’t see straight” were actually based in fact? Lia didn’t move. She didn’t even have the decency to look surprised or shocked or nervous. She didn’t even stand up to confront him or offer some attempt at pitiful denials or some sort of half-hearted words implying that she didn’t know what was going on and why he had come rushing in here. She just sat and looked at him as if she had nothing on her mind but waiting to see what he would say -- as if she hadn’t just done something irredeemable to the sister who made her the center of her world.

  Well, if she was waiting for him to talk, then she would be waiting for a long, long time. He had nothing to say to her -- nothing in words. He was more in an action taking frame of mind. He couldn’t recall ever being so angry in the course of his life. The thought of Meredyth (strong willed, capable Meredyth) being reduced to hurt and taken advantage of was enough to push him over the edge. The spots were dancing in front of his eyes in ever increasing numbers, but they didn’t stop him from making his way across the room. Before his brain caught up with his body’s motions, Lia wasn’t sitting in the chair any longer.

  She was on the floor. It took him a moment to realize how she had gotten there. He had backhanded her out of the chair. That was good. He had wanted to hit her. She deserved to be hit. One hit wasn’t nearly enough. She blinked up at him still looking at him with no protests or exclamations, and he couldn’t stand it. She had no right to be calm. She had no right to be anything. An overwhelming sense of rage flew through his head and flooded him with a desire to inflict damage, to hurt someone, to hurt her, to wipe that watching look off of her face and replace it with some small measure of the hurt that he was certain would be visible (even if only to him) on his wife’s face when she finally processed what all had been done to her.

  He felt his foot shooting forward to kick the girl sitting on the floor in front of him, and the spots finished closing off his sense of vision. He knew nothing but focused rage for the next while. When he next thought of anything (became capable of thinking again really), the first thing that he noticed was that the knuckles of his hand stung. He lifted it up in front of his face and noted that he had busted them open somehow. He tried to bend his fingers and found that it wasn’t worth pushing through the stiffness in them to do it. He would have to clean that up -- bandage it or something.

  He was sitting in a desk chair (slumped really), and he was really tired. He couldn’t think why. He had been really angry about something. What had that been? It all came back to him in a rushing flood. That little sneak had done something to Meredyth’s project and ruined it. He had come to the program room to shut everything down, and she had been there when he arrived.

  The next thing he noticed was the blood. It was splattered on the wall in front of him, and it looked a little excessive to have come from his hand. His eyes tracked down, and he spotted her. It wasn’t his blood on the wall. It was Lia’s, and it wasn’t just on the wall. There was some on the floor and some creating an unpleasant color contrast in her hair. He couldn’t see her face. She was on her side turned toward the wall, but she seemed awfully still. His brain couldn’t seem to latch on to any thought other than the fact that she seemed awfully still.

  Then, it processed the fact that someone was calling his name. Meredyth was calling his name. The sound was coming from the hallway, and it was getting closer. He jumped up mildly panicked not sure whether he intended to bend down and check on the girl on the floor in front of him or to bolt toward the door. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have time to take either course of action. The door opened, and Meredyth was there taking in the scene in the time it took for him to process that she was really there.