Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  Anna was willing to admit that she found herself to be a little bit on the cynical side. It wasn’t her favorite part of who she was, but she had learned to work with it. Sometimes, that cynicism still caught her by surprise when it would occur to her to look at a particular transaction a little more closely or to question the possible motives behind the sponsorship of a certain piece of legislation. She might not be overly fond of her encroaching cynicism, but she knew enough that she knew when she should listen to it. That didn’t mean that she always did so in a timely manner -- such was the case when it first struck her that Meredyth’s activities had stepped up in their level of accuracy in a manner that wasn’t consistent with what had been a fairly predictable rate of improvement.

  It was easy to dismiss. She had always told Connor that how much time they had was entirely dependent on how good the people Meredyth was using were at what they did. They might have gotten better, or she might have found new help. Either explanation could lead to the rapidly rising rate she was seeing. They had known that it was coming. They had known that they would end up playing a game where they were forever trying to slow her down while she was forever gaining ground unless something catastrophic happened to the materials that Meredyth had acquired. She had just hoped that they had a little more time before they dropped into that final spiral pattern.

  Anna wouldn’t have bothered to pretend that it didn’t hurt a little bit (but no one ever asked her, so she didn’t have to admit it) that her programing wasn’t as difficult to figure out and reverse engineer as she had hoped that it would be. Besides, there were always far more important in the grand scheme of things items to worry over than her pride -- like her brother and the existence of the world as she knew it. She tended to focus more on Kyle because, in theory, he should be the one that it was simpler to do something about (although she found herself wondering how accurate that assessment actually was at times).

  That, ultimately, was why she hadn’t paid as much attention to the implications of what she was seeing as she should have. She was distracted. It had not escaped her attention that Lia made a habit of telling things to Kyle that she wasn’t sharing with the rest of them. It was painfully obvious to her (as she knew her little brother as well as she did) that there were times when Lia was the subject of conversation when a look would appear on his face that she could only describe as barely held in check rage. She could almost see a tirade of words being swallowed back as he took deep breaths, and she could plainly see the struggle painted across his features as he fought back the compulsion to say them. She wished he would just spit out whatever it was.

  It would be easier on him by far. She had had a few weeks, at the beginning, when she had resented the fact that Lia had obviously placed a double burden on his shoulders. The first being whatever it was that she had confided and the second being the promise of confidentiality that she had equally obviously extracted. It was, however, hard to hold a grudge against a child (and despite the protests to the contrary, that was exactly what Lia was) who had had her entire world upended by someone that she should have been able to trust for the simple reason that she had been trying to help to do the right thing. She even kept at it as best she could despite the whole up ending of her world scenario.

  That initial rush of information that Lia had imparted after they reestablished communication had been jumbled but brilliant. It had been very clear (upon closer inspection) that Lia had a better sense of what they were up against and how things were looking to play out than either herself or even Connor had ever given her credit for realizing or understanding. Anna hated it. She hated it in the same way that she had hated Connor’s initial decision to let both Kyle and Lia be involved. They shouldn’t have needed to be. They should have been kids. They shouldn’t have had any of it hanging over their heads.

  In the months that Lia had hung around the McKee apartment, the one thing that had struck Anna most about the younger girl was how much she reminded her of her brother in the way that she casually talked about things that should have been traumatic as if they were common, everyday occurrences. They had both dealt with things they shouldn’t have too young. Anna knew it wasn’t entirely reasonable of her to view it that way -- the two of them were hardly the only children in the world who had lost a parent (or both), but they were the ones that she interacted with on a regular basis. They were the ones that she saw dealing with the aftermath. It wasn’t that she wanted either of them to be shut down by grief or to spend their days dwelling on what they had lost. She just wished that loss wasn’t something that the two of them had learned to be so comfortable around.

  She got over her displeasure with Lia’s habit of confiding in Kyle. The girl needed someone to confide in, and she couldn’t really argue that her brother wasn’t a worthy choice. His loyalty in keeping his silence on the matter never really wavered. Whatever it was that the two of them were hiding, Lia wasn’t comfortable with Connor knowing (which, by extension, Anna knew meant her own exclusion). She had drawn her own conclusions. The way Lia had backed off from writing in her own conclusions and tie togethers in the information she sent and started dropping random hints as though they were casual pieces of meaningless information demonstrated a clear intention to distance herself from the information she was providing. She still wanted to help, she was still helping, but she didn’t want them to associate her with the help. It wasn’t as though it worked, but it seemed to be the route that Lia wanted to follow.

  If you tied that together with a few comments here and there back in the time before Lia stopped discussing the matter at all about being “tainted” by your family’s actions (which Anna did), then she figured that Lia was feeling as if she only had a limited amount of time before they started lumping her together with Meredyth. It probably made sense when you were seventeen and upset, and it certainly was the only rational explanation that Anna could come up with for why Lia would want them to think that the information she was providing wasn’t being intentionally provided (she wouldn’t want it to be considered likewise “tainted”). It was like Anna had often thought -- Lia was still a child, and you can’t always win with logic when you are dealing with seventeen.

  It offered an easy explanation for Kyle’s predicament as well. Lia wouldn’t want him sharing her fears, and Kyle would respect her wishes even if he was chomping at the bit to get them to reassure her along with the assurances she was already certain that her brother was offering. They weren’t about to start assuming Lia was untrustworthy by association, but she doubted that Lia would really hear that if the words were offered. This was one of those things that the teenager would have to work through herself. Anna didn’t have proof that that was, in fact, the reality of the situation, but she was confident that it was the best application of what she did know possible. She didn’t have any reason to think that she might be wrong.

  It reinforced her belief that Kyle and Lia both had had too much pressure placed on them, and she used it (in her head, she wasn’t going to say anything to Connor that might set off any more of what she referred to as his Lia guilt) as justification that she was correct to cut Kyle off when he went to school that fall. That had blown up in her face spectacularly, but the two of them (she and Kyle that was) had gotten their mutual feelings on the subject duly aired. Even if they weren’t necessarily in agreement, they had reached a place where both of them could function without a gratuitous amount of additional stress (and the last thing that any of them needed was any more stress).

  Before she knew it, the observe, conclude, and counter repetition of actions between them and the no longer so newly wed Walshes had become so routine (although she didn’t think that her astonishment over the people that Connor and Will had access to ever would) that she hardly noticed that they had gotten all the way around to summer again. It had never been formally discussed, but she had rather assumed (and she found later that Connor and Kyl
e both had as well) that when Lia (now eighteen and for legal purposes no longer under her father’s, which in reality meant Meredyth’s, control) graduated from her senior year at the boarding school she had been shut up in for the majority of two years of her life, she would be coming home to them as opposed to the family she possessed by blood ties.

  That didn’t happen. There was hedging about dates, half-alluded mentions of another summer term, and a general unwillingness to give any of them (and much to the surprise of both Connor and Anna that included Kyle) a straight answer about when she would be back. The next thing any of them knew, there was Lia calmly standing beside Meredyth in a photo spread about one of their father’s campaign events.

  “You aren’t the only one with connections” was the only message that she sent in answer to Connor’s demands of what she thought she was doing.

  “You and Connor can’t hog all the weight of the world on your shoulders,” she initially replied to Anna’s own inquiries.

  What she told Kyle remained, as usual, kept strictly between the two of them, but it was plain (to Anna at least) that he wasn’t pleased with her reasons. She was a sister before she was many other things, and she wasn’t ashamed to admit that she was willing to stoop to using guilt trips when her brother’s peace of mind was involved. She had half expected Lia to get angry in response just as she had half expected that the girl would show up on their doorstep with bags in hand. What she hadn’t expected was what she ended up getting - which was an admonition (calm and without any hint of anger, but an admonition none the less).

  “He hates it when you coddle him, Anna, but I can’t say that I mind that someone is watching out for him. It’ll all be for the best this way. He’ll see that someday even if he doesn’t understand it now -- him and you and Connor and maybe even Will.”

  There was a final sounding note to that message that Anna didn’t like. She dismissed it, eventually, as Lia being dramatic as she convinced herself that whatever scheme of putting herself right in the middle of Meredyth’s sights (whether she thought she was spying or countering or whatever it was that she thought she was accomplishing when she was mostly just stressing them all out over what kind of trouble she was going to get herself into) that she was following was necessary, but she didn’t share the contents of that message with any of the others. She wouldn’t have been able to explain why.

  Likewise, she wouldn’t be able to tell you when the suspicion first crept in to her mind. That was likely because she was almost certain that she had dismissed it out of hand multiple times before she even realized that she was processing the thought. Then, there came the period of time where she was dismissing the thought when she realized that she was processing it. That was followed by a series of reactions that included dismissing her own thought processes, rolling her eyes at what must be the ridiculous turn that her thought processes had taken, and the flat out period of denial of what she was seeing.

  She had found other methods of explanation, and it was entirely possible that one of those alternative methods was, in fact, the real reason that she was seeing what she was seeing. That didn’t change the reality of what was in front of her, and it didn’t remove the possibility that they had a bigger problem on their hands. It wasn’t like the problems they were dealing with weren’t already enough to be getting on with as it was. This would, however, be different. This would be nothing short of demoralizing. She found herself sneaking glances at Kyle during random times and wondering just how badly he would take the possibility (let alone if her straying thoughts turned out to be accurate). She never liked where that wondering led her. She spent weeks biting her tongue, she spent weeks focusing on other possibilities and how best to mitigate them, and she spent weeks telling herself that they hadn’t lost Lia.

  They couldn’t have lost Lia. The girl that had been seated at her dinner table and stolen hopeful glances at her brother and teased Connor out of melancholy reflections and helped her sort the information that made Glimpse effective at helping them prevent a power hungry maniac from “nudging” the world into what she thought she wanted it to be had not flipped on them and sold them out to the other side. She hadn’t. It didn’t make a bit of sense. She had no reason. She had been as squarely in their camp as Connor with probably even more first-hand experience reasons as to why she was going to stay that way.

  Anna wasn’t seeing what she thought she was seeing. She had crossed the line from cynicism to paranoia. That was what was causing her to see things that weren’t actually there. That was, at least, what she tried to tell herself. It didn’t work for long. Reality was and denying it did nothing but hinder them further (and they were already hindered by too many things). It was the day that she caught Connor taking the same sort of lingering, pondering look at Kyle that she had been giving him that she knew for certain that it wasn’t all in her head. He caught her catching him, and the look that they exchanged said a whole lot of things that neither one of them wanted to be saying. She never asked him what he might have done about it, and he, in turn, never asked her what she might have chosen to ask Lia either.

  Two days later, Lia stopped answering their messages. What other conclusion were they supposed to draw given the picture that was being drawn in front of them -- even if there were very few things higher on the list of things that Anna would never want to admit? She found herself watching her brother more closely -- waiting for an opening of some kind even though she had no idea what kind of opening would ever make that conversation run smoothly. Kyle was a bright kid, and he would draw conclusions just like the rest of them had. Maybe she wouldn’t have to bring it up first. She so did not want to have to bring it up first.

  It was in those days that she lost what little tolerance she had ever maintained for Karen’s presence in her home. She had waited for Kyle to say something. Connor had waited for Kyle to say something. Will went on as if he hadn’t noticed any sort of a change (he might not have for all Anna knew as he tended to be very dismissive of anything that didn’t directly relate to Will). Kyle didn’t say anything. Kyle didn’t imply anything. Kyle just got quieter.

  Karen got louder. Karen talked. Karen implied. Karen suggested. Karen accused. Karen did it loudly, and she didn’t leave her comments without direction. They were sometimes mockingly mentioned and sometimes harshly pointed, but they were always designed to target someone in particular. Karen (and if even Karen had pieced together the tension and the pieces of details and arrived at the conclusion that Lia had flipped allegiance what did that say about the level of compellingness of the evidence) used the situation with Lia to take jabs at Connor, to pick at Anna, and to batter Kyle.

  It was more than Anna was in a mental state to take. She was not blind to her own previous treatment of the other woman, and she knew that she had never passed for anything further than allowing the other woman to be around on sufferance at best. Anna was practical (most of the time), and Connor couldn’t do everything on his own. They needed Will and his sphere of influence -- the people he knew or knew people who knew, the places that he could get into, the businessmen who would take a hint from him that a particular deal might not be in their best interest, the public servants who might listen to a suggestion that a certain vote might come back to bite them in a way that they had not yet thought about. They were teetering on the edge enough without losing the possibility of what Will could do, and Anna wasn’t about to endanger that simply because someone grated on her every nerve.

  Will and Karen were apparently a package deal (although why Karen wanted anything to do with something she was so blatantly disdainful of was a mystery to all of them with, Anna was certain, Will included). She would deal. That had been her mantra from the first moment the other woman had intruded -- quite literally. Karen had taken less than thirty seconds to establish herself as unwanted and obnoxious in Anna’s opinion, but that didn’t matter. Keeping Will’s help mattered. She dealt with
Karen’s presence and Karen’s commentary and Karen’s inane questions and Karen’s ill-timed jokes and Karen’s dismissal of her brother and Karen’s inability to keep her mouth shut and Karen’s moodiness and Karen’s need for attention and Karen’s grating habit of moving things that weren’t hers to move and Karen’s mocking and just Karen’s existence in general.

  Anna thought she had been rather forbearing (if not entirely gracious) given the circumstances. All of that changed when everything went wrong with Lia. Karen was suddenly much more than an annoyance. She was toxic (especially for Kyle), and Anna had no tolerance in her for that. She found herself snapping at the other woman -- voicing retorts that she would have previously bitten back and being generally nasty in a manner that would normally have embarrassed her with its level of incivility. Sometimes, it felt as though Karen deliberately provoked her, but she told herself that she was just out of patience.

  It had been a particularly (even by the standards which they were currently operating under) heated exchange between herself and Karen that had spiraled into a not very pleasant altercation between Connor and Will when Kyle had finally jumped into the middle of things and broken his silence on the subject. One minute there had been two separate but loosely tied together rather irate conversations going on, the next everyone was staring in stunned silence at Kyle who had just bellowed at all of them.

  “Shut up!” The words echoed. Anna vaguely registered the insulted expression Will was exhibiting in contrast to the look of surprise on Connor’s face and the expectant, almost pleased look Karen had before Kyle was continuing.

  “Lia is not helping Meredyth,” the young man in front of them was saying in an assured tone that was little short of commanding. It was, Anna realized with a small start, the first time that she had ever looked at her brother and had the appellation man float through her thoughts instead of boy. She didn’t have time to dwell on the thought or on what it meant. Will was attempting to voice some sort of a protest, but Kyle wasn’t letting him speak. “I need to tell the two of you something,” he directed at her and Connor before shooting a dismissive look in the direction of the other two present in the room. “They aren’t included.”

  Will was huffing, but Karen nodded and guided him out the door. It was a disturbingly classy (only because it was so not a Karen type behavior) move on her part. Anna might have known that the other woman wouldn’t just let the moment end in a positive fashion.

  “Just remember,” she threw over her shoulder. “If that program of yours works as well as you all claim, then you should be able to settle this.” She finished pushing a still huffing Will out of sight. “Should have done it weeks ago,” she could be heard muttering as the door closed behind her.

  Kyle glared in the direction she had gone for a moment before Connor cleared his throat in a manner that left Anna unsure whether it had been a hint or a nervous gesture. “I know it looks bad,” Kyle told them turning around but not meeting their eyes with his own. Anna’s heart clenched at the sound of his voice and what it was clearly costing him to say the words out loud. “I know what the two of you are thinking even if you haven’t been saying it out loud. I know what Karen’s been hinting.” Anna couldn’t hold back the scoffing sound that left her throat. Karen had hardly been hinting. Kyle didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m not trying to tell you that something isn’t going on,” he continued. “But,” he finally made eye contact -- Anna couldn’t find any word other than steely to describe his gaze, “I am telling you that it isn’t what you are thinking. I think you both should know her better than that, but maybe you don’t. And maybe you are too caught up in the big picture and how much stuff gets shoved off on the two of you to deal with that you can’t afford to not be suspicious. You should just remember that we already know exactly how Lia feels about what her sister is doing. If that’s not enough, then Lia still has every reason to do whatever she can to pay Meredyth back for what she did to her.”

  Anna found herself having trouble processing her brother’s words. There was something that she was missing that made them not quite make sense. It was Connor who moved the conversation forward. “Are you going to tell us what she told you that she didn’t share with the rest of us?” Oh, so it hadn’t just been her that had noticed. It was hard to tell sometimes with Connor; he kept so many things internalized.

  “I am.”

  The story that spilled forth was hard for Anna to take. It was partly because she was an older sister, and it flew in the face of every piece of her worldview about what that relationship meant. It was partly because it meant that so many of the conclusions that she had drawn about what was being kept from her were incorrect, and she had to readjust her perspective to fit the new boundary lines within which it was contained. In the end, it didn’t accomplish what she knew that Kyle wanted to accomplish with finally spilling out the details of the story. In the end, it didn’t leave Lia above suspicion and make everything go back to the way it was before. It just left them with another reason that Lia needed to be cut out of their circle.

  Connor got there first. “Has it occurred to you that Meredyth might have gotten to her again?” He asked her brother as gently as he could.

  “Like I don’t worry that that’s going to happen every day?” He retorted before his shoulders slumped, and he looked at them both with an expression that put Anna’s heart on edge and reminded her how very young her baby brother really was. “She hasn’t.”

  “Kyle . . .,” she started.

  “She hasn’t, okay? I watch for that.”

  “It might not even be Lia that we’ve been talking to,” Connor tried.

  “It’s Lia. I check. I ask questions. I’m not as out of my league in all of this as you all want me to be.” Connor gave her a pleading sort of look, and Anna took a deep breath before she waded back into the fray.

  “If someone got access to her things, then they could pretend,” she offered.

  “She’s not out of her league either, Anna. She knows what she’s doing.” A ghost of a smile flickered across the corners of his mouth for a moment. “You are the one who taught her. There’s nothing for anyone to get hold of to use to pretend to be her because she doesn’t keep anything. Everything gets wiped. I’m telling you that it’s still Lia, and I’m telling you that she’s not on Meredyth’s side.” Connor was the one who offered the response, and Anna could hear (even under the carefully controlled tone that he was using) how much it was hurting him to say the words.

  “We can’t take that kind of chance, Kyle.” Her brother opened his mouth to argue, but Connor didn’t give him a chance to let the words come out. “And if it is still Lia on the other side of that communication line, and if she’s still our Lia, then she’ll understand that.” Anna winced at the inflection that Connor had placed on the word “our.” Everything wrong with the whole messed up situation seemed to find its way in to settle in that word. How had it gotten to this?

  Kyle spun on his heel and disappeared out the door. Anna started to follow after him, but Connor’s hand on her shoulder stopped her. “There’s nothing you’ve got to say right now that he wants or needs to hear.”

  She wanted to shove his hand off of her and tell him to mind his own business. That was her brother that was hurting and it was her job to fix it and a hundred other things that expressed her frustration with how wrong everything was, but she held her tongue. She walked away from him and dove into the first file that she came to on her desk and hoped that he would take the hint.

  “Anna . . .,” he spoke clearly showing that her hint hadn’t been taken.

  “Not now, Connor,” she told him. She hated the crack in her voice as she said the words. “There’s nothing you’ve got to say right now that I want or need to hear either.”