Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~~~~

  “The Marguerite that you thought you knew is no more. Only the Empress of the Mists remains. You would do well to remember that it is so. Better that you accept and grieve now than you be blindsided by the fact at an inopportune moment.” Connor Ridley, Shadows Fall

  The interview had gone well -- surprisingly so in fact. It took far less time than Meredyth had allocated to have Mrs. Ridley promising to get back to her as quickly as she could. She really need not have bothered with the face to face meeting after all. She was quite confident that she could have achieved her objective with a simple phone call. That was unexpected.

  There was no logical reason for Jennifer (as in, please dear do call me Jennifer, we’ve known each other for such a long time) to have acceded to her request. It was, quite frankly, an all-around bad business practice, and the Ridleys were not, under normal circumstances, the bad business practice kind. She used to admire that about them.

  In any logical version of reality, she should have been politely told that such things would be made available to her after everything was signed and official and sent on her way. She had been prepared to talk her way around that. She had been prepared to offer reasons and rationales as to why bending of the normal procedures should be adopted.

  She knew that her contact person had displayed a previous inclination to go out of her way to be “helpful” with whatever she might require. She had not been prepared for said help to come so quickly (or for it to be offered up on a silver platter with little prompting). Jennifer Ridley had been positively effusive in her assurances that such a little matter was no trouble before she jumped topic to how pleased she was that at last they and Meredyth would all be working together “as they should have been all along.”

  It was no matter. The extra time in her day would be welcome. She had plenty of items needing her attention (Wyatt’s recent intractableness as well as the ever evolving situation with Lia’s latent rebellious tendencies springing to the fore included). She was under the impression (and her impressions nearly always steered her correctly) that she could have asked for a lot more from her future business associates at Ridley Resources without meeting with any resistance.

  In a normal business arrangement, it would have been a red flag that made her wary of doing business with people who appeared to handle their product development with such laxness. This was not a normal business arrangement. She was not a normal business associate. Travis and Jennifer Ridley weren’t fools -- except when it came to all things involving their son.

  It was almost enough to make her feel badly for Connor. Almost being the key word in that sentence (she might have mustered up a tad bit more sympathy if she didn’t suspect that Lia’s recent impulsiveness and out of character behavior could be directly traced back to his departure and subsequent reentrance into her life). Didn’t they always say that teenage girls without fathers were more prone to these phases of seeking attention from adolescent males?

  If their father had been a little more present in Lia’s life, she might not have had such an unreasonable attachment to Connor during her childhood in the first place. If Connor hadn’t been such a stubborn, self-righteous fool, Lia would never have had to lose him. Connor’s attempt to distract her by setting up that comic store boy with her sister was an amateurish move. It further displayed how far out of his league he was in his attempts to block her from her goals.

  And, quite frankly, she was disappointed that he would even include Lia in his attempts in the first place. He probably thought that he was offering Lia some nice, safe, normal companionship for her life in the process. He had likely given himself some justification about helping to prevent her corruption by Meredyth. She cut off the direction of her thoughts. She was not going to revisit those conversations (particularly not the very last). That was all dead and buried. No, there were plenty of reasons to not get bogged down with any flutterings of sympathy on behalf of Connor Ridley.

  Still, it must be difficult to have such things repeatedly pushed on you -- to know that your parents were so willing to fall all over themselves to make it clear to your ex that they were not on your side. It was one thing to know and another thing entirely to have your family go out of their way to make sure you wouldn’t forget it. One would have thought that six years would have lessened their compulsion to fawn over her, but today made it perfectly clear that it had not.

  Connor’s parents were unfailingly blind when it came to the realities surrounding the end of their engagement (why they found it necessary to flaunt their stance so excessively had never been clear to her). It was yet another example in her experience of people who should be capable of better decision making failing to follow through with it in practice. That was hardly her fault. Connor was the one who had obviously never bothered to enlighten them. She did not know why he hadn’t; she did not care. The lines upon which Connor’s thought processes ran was a subject that she had no interest in dwelling upon ever again.

  She, however, was not going to allow herself to be bothered by (or to waste time pondering the brain challenge puzzle that was) the never ending quagmire that was the ever continuing miscommunication between the senior Ridleys and Connor. There had been a time when she was actively involved in trying to bridge the chronic divide. It was no longer her problem, and she was pleased to be rid of all of it.

  For her present purposes, she could be grateful that she had never made much headway (there were several instances of failure during her teenage and early adult years that she had learned to embrace as the best of all possible outcomes) as the whole situation worked in her favor.

  She had no qualms in regards to taking her advantages where she could find them. The Ridley family situation was one such advantage, and she would harbor no doubts about exploiting it. What mattered was what she wanted and how she was going to get it.

  She wanted Glimpse. She was going to have Glimpse. That was all there was to that. It didn’t matter which set of circumstances brought it to her. There was no reason to believe that all items on her agenda would not proceed according to plan, but she was a firm adherent to the principle of backup planning (whether it was truly needed or not).

  The fact that Connor was currently standing in front of her guarding the elevator doors as if they were the entrance to his own personal gold mine further illustrated how far out of his depth he was. He had swooped in from out of seemingly nowhere and planted himself in her path. He was going to do this here? In public? Where it would undoubtedly be reported back to his parents?

  She almost allowed herself to smile in amusement. That was so very impulsively, predictably Connor. It was sad really. He couldn’t even manage to make himself enough of a viable nuisance to need to be taught to stay out of her way.

  It didn’t take long to extricate herself from the altercation (although it seemed grandiose to offer their little encounter that title). There had been very little effort required on her part to have him squirming and dismayed. She was in her car pondering how swimmingly her day was going less than twenty minutes later. She had picked up extra time, and she had gotten free entertainment via Connor’s display in the hallway -- not to mention the securing of her contingency plans. Her morning excursion to RR had been well spent.

  It never ceased to amaze her how vastly incompetent a significant portion of the population managed to be while still muddling through their day to day lives. It was not so much that they lived their lives in slovenly, unthinking disorganization that caused her amazement -- she had become rather jaded and inoculated to the fact of those realities quite some time ago. It was the fact that their lives continued to go on despite all of their carelessnesses and inept unthinking decision making that still caused her to pause and shake her head in wonder.

  It was not the good sort of wonder. Why human beings were so collectively incapable of appropriate life decisions and action taking had ceased t
o be of concern to her. The only items of concern were how to mitigate the consequences in the short term and how to prevent its continuance in the future.

  In regards to mitigation, she had some unpleasant tasks to accomplish due to a wayward fiancé’s delusions of capability. That wasn’t entirely fair. Her displeasure was clouding her view of the situation. It wasn’t as though it wasn’t repairable. There was no permanent damage. She couldn’t deny that she had been very angry with him when she first learned of his little foray into independence. Time and logic had toned down her initial response. She was far more reasonable about it now.

  It was cute, in a way, that Wyatt thought he would go off and make something on his own. In his misguided worldview, it would have seemed an impressive gesture. It would have been like a metaphysical bouquet of flowers for him to offer her. She could understand where his thinking went wrong. It was cute once. She was going to make certain that he held no further delusions that it would be tolerated a second time.

  Planning was not Wyatt’s realm of expertise. Seeing the big picture was not Wyatt’s realm of expertise. Executing directives was where Wyatt came in handy. He was good at it. He even excelled. He was generally dependable (and she was a person who didn’t find it pleasant to be required to do any depending). She and Wyatt made sense as they were -- she did the planning; he did the heavy lifting.

  They were a team. They were meant to be. The best thing about Wyatt (in her opinion) was his lack of curiosity. If she told him to do something, then he didn’t badger her about why it needed doing. He trusted that she knew what she was talking about.

  That was her dear, sweet Wyatt. It was refreshing, really, the way that he did what he was told. Why shouldn’t he? He knew where they stood. He knew she would do what was best. He didn’t question her motives or her methods. She knew how to appreciate that kind of trust, and Wyatt knew how to appreciate her. They would be very happy together. They were already very happy together. She had had far too much of her life swept up by unappreciative questioners who refused to see . . . she wasn’t going to think about that. That part of her life was over -- except, of course, as a petty annoyance that occasionally reared its head.

  She didn’t mind so much when it did. It was amusing to have someone around, sparingly of course (very, very sparingly), that truly understood what she was doing (even if he did fail to grasp the inevitability of it all). It was especially entertaining when he came all unhinged in his frustration over his inability to stop her.

  That was the one area where Wyatt lacked as a companion (if you could, in fact, refer to it as a lack, and she supposed that some people could) -- he trusted her implicitly without needing to understand. There were no heart to hearts; there were no discussions of motivations. There were no challenges to her ability to explain herself satisfactorily. All in all, she rather preferred the implicit trust.

  Wyatt was a dear. She would see to the big picture; Wyatt would handle the immediate courses of action in the manner that she deemed best. It was a perfect arrangement. They were perfect. They would bring the world to perfection with them. Nothing and no one was going to get in the way of that -- not even Wyatt himself.

  She would deal with this escapade of his, and they would finalize the details of the engagement party. She really had so much to do. She sent a final mental thank you to Jennifer Ridley for her assistance in clearing up some space in her schedule and put any further thoughts about the woman or her family out of her mind.