Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

  “She worries for you.”

  “It is not her worry to which I object, sire -- merely the manner in which she applies it.”

  “What would you have her do?”

  “I would have her understand that there is no unknowing and no unseeing. It does no good to pretend otherwise.”

  Connor Ridley, Shadows Fall

  Karen Howell would tell you that everything would make perfect sense if you would only look at everything from her perspective. She wasn’t shy or retiring, and she had no difficulties making her opinions known to those around her. She was also bright and observant enough to know that those qualities didn’t always make her the most popular of people to have around. Her sisters had kept a nearly constant stream of complaints on the topic voiced throughout their childhood and adolescence, and they had been quick to use the oft spoken “you aren’t the boss of me” whenever they didn’t like what they were hearing. They could have saved themselves a lot of heart scalds growing up if they had paid attention to what Karen was telling them, but they had chafed against an older sister who was (in their opinion) always overstepping her boundaries.

  Karen didn’t care -- not anymore. She had learned that when it came to her sisters, she would say what she wanted to say and then move on without paying any mind to how the two of them groused in response. Karen was naturally bossy (and she did nothing to curb that inclination), but she wasn’t suffering from any delusions about how most folks responded to being bossed at. It was kind of sad how she couldn’t even think thoughts inside of her head anymore without hearing the sound of Will offering little pieces of grammar correction (currently that sentences weren’t supposed to end with prepositions), but it was also kind of endearing the way he had gotten his habits all jumbled up in her life.

  Will was special like that (she most definitely had never had random thoughts occur to her before about what any previous boyfriends would say about what she was thinking, which she had reflected before was maybe a sign that they shouldn’t have been her boyfriends). Will wasn’t different than anyone she had ever met before, but he was very different from anyone she had ever bothered to get to know better. People who had known Karen all of her life would tell you that on top of being both opinionated and bossy, she was also impulsive and prone to making seemingly random life choices. They would be wrong. Just because she didn’t publicize her thought processes didn’t mean that she didn’t have them. Being very vocal about her opinions on a variety of topics and what she thought about other people’s choices left others with the impression that her lack of sharing on the topic of her own meant that she didn’t put much thought into them.

  Her career path was one of those occasions. Her family would tell you that she simply woke up one morning and decided that it might be amusing to tend to sick people. Karen could tell you that she had spent nearly two years considering her options before determining that a career path wherein she would be not only required but encouraged (and thanked for it) to display a vested interest in telling the people under her care what they should be doing was exactly the type of environment where she would flourish. She lived and breathed her job. She was good at it, she enjoyed it, and it had the added bonus of enticing her all over again with something different being presented every day. She went every day because she wanted to be there.

  That was something that Will and she had in common. Will was as fond of his job as she was of hers. He had that same tone of pleased self-importance in his voice when he talked about literary criticism and exposing young minds to the great works of ages past as she did when she talked about her patients (in general terms only of course, specifics were a no-no of the first order when it came to the privacy of the people where she worked). Will and she had lots of things in common where it counted (even if other people tended to blink at them in that I’m thinking what are you thinking even if I’m going to be too polite to say it out loud way when introductions were made).

  Karen didn’t care. She was hardly going to be bothered by people who didn’t look beyond the surface issues of loud versus reserved and brash versus unassuming. Will was altogether endearing, and they did good things for each other. Her life was just how she liked it without Will in it, and it was better with him around. He was focused and orderly and steady (boring she always told him with a teasing grin so he would know just how much she enjoyed that fact about him). It was, however, his orderly steadiness that made it so very obvious when something changed.

  It was the tension that she noticed first. There was a small amount of abrasiveness in the way that Will usually acted caused by how often his head wasn’t actively participating in being wherever the rest of his body was located. Karen thought it was cute -- the way his eyes would sort of glaze so that you could tell that his thoughts had drifted off to something else before they would suddenly snap back into focus with such intensity that you could tell you were the only thing he was even noticing existed. Some women would be put off by the initial tuning out -- Karen had stuck around long enough to know that the hyper focused end game of the cycle was more than worth it (just as Will had stuck around long enough to find some things about her worth putting up with the bossiness that so many others had found off putting in the course of her life).

  Then, there came a time when his “blank spaces” (as she called them) weren’t just innocent little endearing lapses. A level of tension crept into them that she had never seen before. The abrasiveness of the way Will would cut off in mid conversation increased exponentially. She knew him. She knew that something was wrong; something was worrying him. He wouldn’t tell her what it was. He wouldn’t even admit that whatever it was existed.

  Karen, true to her shout out your opinions first and sort things out later personality, got angry. That was when she knew that there was something really, really wrong. Will didn’t even seem to notice that she was angry. He had been around long enough to know that ignoring an angry Karen was not something that ended well. That kind of ignoring was not something that Will did when it came to her. Karen moved from anger to concern.

  The first time she saw Will after his brother’s engagement party she moved from concerned to terrified. She hadn’t gone with him. She never went with him to family functions, and she never thought anything of it. There was no secret made of the fact that Will and his brother were not each other’s biggest fans. He attended brother related or present events only to appease his parents. Karen never questioned her lack of an invitation. She didn’t even go to her own family’s events (let alone drag Will along with her), so why would she want to go and try to play nice with a sibling that he didn’t even like? It made perfect sense to her.

  The aftermath of that engagement party was the first time she found cause to regret that pattern. She would really, really like to know what had happened that day that left her Will the jumbled up, unpredictable mess that he became in the weeks following. He was tense all of the time. He randomly broke up his routine with disappearances for which he did not account. He was suddenly interested in business and political news, and he started doing some type of work (apparently for his parents) when he had only ever before expressed a desire to be as uninvolved in their company as he could get away with being. It was all wrong for everything that she knew about Will, and she didn’t like it.

  Mostly, she didn’t like that he wouldn’t admit it. Everything in her revolted against not knowing, not being able to make suggestions, and not being able to help. All the hard won lessons in her life about being unconcerned if people took her advice or not all came falling down around her ears when it came to Will. She couldn’t be unconcerned. She couldn’t just let it go. It hurt. It hurt in a lengthy list of ways that she couldn’t be bothered to catalog. There was a part of her that wanted to walk away in response. There was a part of her brain that spent all of its time whispering that she needed to remember that her life was still good without Will -- that she hardly ne
eded to put herself through the heart scald that being shut out was giving her.

  There was an equal part that existed to remind her that with Will was better. Since (despite what others would tell you) Karen made most of her life decisions with careful consideration, she took her time deciding whether better was enough. It was easy enough to slip into a routine where she kept putting off a final confrontation (and Will kept deteriorating before her eyes). They were in a holding pattern of sorts, and time passed more quickly than you would expect when you let yourself get comfortable with a holding pattern.

  Will went to his brother’s wedding, and the mood he was in in the following days was something odder yet -- half pleased with himself and half something that Karen couldn’t even define. It was then that she made her decision. The “better” that was her Will in her life was worth fighting for, but it was only worth fighting for if it was actually her Will (not this replacement she was dealing with). She needed to know what was causing the change, so she began following him.