Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

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  “Impulsive, heedless, brash -- call it what you will.”

  “Is stupidity an option?”

  “That would be unkind.”

  “I find I lack charitable feelings at the moment.”

  Connor Ridley, Shadows Fall

  They were all being ridiculous. Will was being ridiculous, and Will didn’t even do ridiculous. Karen was fed up with the lot of them. They had been gearing up for something big (she didn’t know what as per usual), but she had been pleased that there had been actual activity. She had thought that maybe there had been some sort of a turning point (or that her poking and prodding had finally lit a fire underneath someone), and there was going to be some sort of tangible progress one way or another. She wouldn’t even be able to put into words the level of disappointment that she felt when she realized that this was just another one of their little block something that Meredyth Walsh was already looking to do moments.

  She heard all the words (words, words, words, it was all words) about how this would be some sort of major block to a whole subset of plans and how it would slow progress significantly and all the other things that got thrown around by people who had taken to acting like she wasn’t even in the room to hear (and most definitely never tried to offer explanations). She was disappointed to figure it out, but she kept her mouth shut (she was getting more practice with that skill than she had ever planned on getting in the course of her life). When their carefully orchestrated plan apparently blew up in their faces, she kept her mouth shut. When their whole little universe imploded when everyone realized that Meredyth had known their plans, she kept her mouth shut. When a Kyle to Lia line of communication was determined to be the only way that could have happened, she kept her mouth shut. When Kyle argued and contended and then looked like a proverbial kicked puppy after he couldn’t get said trouble creating girl to answer messages, she kept her mouth shut (everyone else was doing plenty of talking anyway). She kept her mouth shut about it all.

  She was finished talking. If they were going to get bogged down in depression, then she sure wasn’t. If they were going to take their eyes off the goal because they were dwelling on a setback, then she wasn’t. If they weren’t going to step up and do what needed to be done, then she would. She was finished with talking. She was going to be getting on with doing. She had given them all plenty of time. She had let herself be sidelined to an observer post. That was over. They wanted to play this as some sort of convoluted back and forth game. That was over. This was Karen’s game now, and she was going to play it Karen’s way.

  It wasn’t altogether hard to find out what she needed to find. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been sitting there half-forgotten for months watching how they went about doing (or not doing) what they did. She might not know exactly what she was doing, but she knew enough to muddle her way through to suit her purposes. Files were easy enough to get into to sneak looks at things. They were all too rattled (and whatever other variety of emotions they were caught up in) to be paying attention to what annoying, mouthy Karen was doing. She had known that there must be big things she wasn’t clear on the details of -- she hadn’t needed the actual details to know that they must be there for Will to be caught up in it. She hadn’t asked. She still didn’t ask. She just went digging.

  That Will’s brother was not a good guy had never been up for debate from her perspective, but what she came across in her digging couldn’t be covered by that description. There was being not a good guy, and there was something else altogether. Wyatt Walsh was something else altogether, and his wife was something else again. She was finished trying to figure out why they didn’t just run with what they knew. She was finished with trying to figure out why they thought that the still rather new Mrs. Walsh would be able to wriggle out of anything that they threw at her. They thought that they needed things to be more concrete; she would find them concrete. She would go to the source. She was tired of all this background nonsense. It was time for everything to be out in the open. She wasn’t even going to bother to try including anyone else. She didn’t have any inclination to listen to their waffling. She was going straight to the source of this mess, and she was going to do it herself.

  If nobody else wanted to bother getting some clarity on the Lia Lawson debacle, then she had no such qualms. (Qualms? Really? Who even used that word? She was burning that reading list of Will’s as soon as she got everything else well settled.) It took a bit for her to manage to be alone with Anna’s computer equipment. Someone was nearly always lurking around like it was some sort of den for them to all come back to while they licked their wounds. It was kind of disturbing the way they all gravitated back and hovered even when they had nothing civil to say to each other.

  Anyway . . . Karen watched and waited (and maybe pulled a few strings to get Will out of her way at a convenient moment), and she finally got a chance to do what she wanted. She wasn’t surprised by what she found out (although she was a little disconcerted that Anna’s oh so carefully protected software or program or whatever it was that they called it was so easy to use when she got to it). It was what all of them should have accepted a long time ago when things first got dicey (it would have saved a whole boat load of trouble as well as avoiding that most recent epic fail). She knew where she was going (hard work that), but she wasn’t entirely certain what she was going to do when she got there. She didn’t bother to worry about that as she made her plans. She was still too disgruntled to care much about anything other than doing something, and it wasn’t like she didn’t have a long drive to figure out what that something should be.