Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

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  Lia Lawson moved quickly to get out of the room; there was no reason for her to linger. She had finished what she had gone in there to do. She had no intention of allowing Karen Howell (of all people) to see her getting all teary eyed (she wasn’t certain that she had moved quite quickly enough, but there was nothing that she could do about that). Teary eyed would have to wait. She had no intention of allowing herself to take the time to get all teary eyed right now (even if she was currently frantically blinking far too rapidly in an attempt to get it to stop that didn’t seem to be working). She didn’t have time. There were too many other things that required her attention at the moment (like plans and distracting her brother-in-law and praying that Karen would display enough sense to not antagonize him if he got back to her before Lia could get her out of the house).

  She could do her crying later (if at all). It could wait for some point in the not so clear future when she actually had time -- time that she most definitely did not have now. This was not the time for tears. This was not the time to think about sentimental things. This was not the time to second guess her course of action. This was not the time to do anything except execute the plans that she had made before she had initiated her altercation with Karen. One did, after all, make plans for a reason -- a part of that reason being the plan being the best course of action for accomplishing what you needed to accomplish. That was why she had taken the time to plan first. She did have some method to her madness despite the fact that she sometimes thought that Wyatt was the only person she knew that actually realized that she did (which was more disturbing than Lia wanted or had time to deal with at the moment). It was vitally important that she have a plan in place before she had gone anywhere near Karen. She had needed to do it while she was clear headed. She had needed to do it before she had more reasons to be distracted.

  Plus, Karen had hardly been part of the original timeline of the original plan, so she had needed to make certain that she had a clear idea of what she was doing in place so that what Karen’s part would be could be imparted in as quick and concise a manner as possible. Lia had decided that concise was of the upmost importance. There had, after all, been the possibility that Karen wouldn’t let her talk at all (she had considered the possibility that there would be slapping, it didn’t seem at all out of bounds with what she had heard about Karen’s personality). She had been counting on getting as much information as possible out before the shock had worn off of the other woman. That had worked (more or less and without the slapping for which Lia was actually very grateful). She had gotten the information out that she needed to get out (plus an extra personal indulgence).

  Besides, concise prevented Lia from having time to second guess herself (and she couldn’t afford to do any second guessing). It had been hard enough to get out of that room with the little bit she had allowed the conversation to drift as it was. Lia took a deep breath and focused on focusing. The first step of the plan (loosely grouped in her head under the heading of “Make Karen Agree to Do What You Ask Whether She Wants to Or Not” followed by subheadings of contingency plans A-G for accomplishing that) had been completed. She was really quite grateful that she hadn’t had to go very far down the contingency plan list as some of them weren’t overly practical for the situation at hand. She had, for instance, no real idea of how she would have managed to knock Karen unconscious and drag her body out of the house without someone noticing.

  Lia shook her head to clear it. That didn’t matter now. She hadn’t needed to get to plan F (she hadn’t even needed to get to plan C). Karen’s cooperation had been garnered (relatively painlessly at that). She could move on down her checklist now. First, she had to get her eyes to stop tearing. She couldn’t think about the last things she had shared with Karen. She couldn’t think about her impulse decision to force her necklace into the other woman’s hand. She hadn’t planned on any of that. Her plans had all revolved around Karen and her willingness or unwillingness to work with her. She hadn’t had time to think about anything else. She didn’t have time to think about any of it now either. She had a list that needed to be followed.

  She moved down the hall and took the stairs two at a time. She had electronics to manipulate, and she couldn’t do that hovering in the hallway outside of the room where Wyatt was keeping Karen. She caught a vague thumping sound that she thought might have been made by Karen kicking the door. She must have realized that she was locked in again. Had she expected any different? It wasn’t as if Lia could just let her wander around the house. There were security guards to be dealt with and Wyatt to redirect. Karen would just have to sit tight and be patient until everything was in place. Somehow, she thought it was just as well that she hadn’t actually said that to Karen while she had been in the room with her. Patience didn’t really strike her as Karen’s virtue of choice. She understood now why Kyle had described Karen as annoying (with the codicil that she would understand when she met her when she had asked him to explain the description).

  Karen wasn’t the most pleasant of persons to try to deal with when one was in a hurry. She seemed to have a habit of pushing for answers to uncomfortable questions that would have been trying to anyone under normal circumstances and was only made worse when one was trying to accomplish something specific and go. Granted, they were hardly in a position to sit down, have a cup of tea, and examine each other’s characters. Those had merely been on the spot observations Lia had made of the other woman, and they were probably heavily influenced by what she had heard previously on the subject. Karen had made it very clear very quickly that Lia was not making her list of favorite people, so she might also have gotten a little bit of a biased view of Karen’s personality. Karen didn’t seem the type to play nice with people she didn’t care for, but it didn’t really matter. She didn’t need to get along with Karen. Karen didn’t need to get along with her. She didn’t need to like Karen. Karen didn’t need to like her. She didn’t need to understand Karen. Karen didn’t need to understand her.

  There was a pattern there. There didn’t need to be any sort of camaraderie or anything of the sort between the two. All that needed to happen was for Karen to follow her directions (which did, technically, require Karen being willing to listen to her, but that was as far as any sort of dealings between the two needed to go). Questions of liking and annoyance aside, she was confident that she could trust Karen to do what she had asked her to do. If the way Lia had let her push the conversation into the realm of Kyle (which was a place that Lia desperately did not want to go with her thoughts at the moment) had helped cement getting Karen’s help, then she wasn’t going to be sorry that it had happened.

  The ability of Karen to help her had sort of dropped into her lap like an unexpected gift, and she was going to make it work. There was the simple fact that she didn’t have much of an option. She was backed into a bit of a corner (understatement of the century), and she was running out of time. Karen was her best option, and she found herself grateful for the other woman’s otherwise potentially obnoxious personality traits that had landed her in a position that gave Lia access to her. Karen had been described to her as forceful, and there had been nothing in their short (but rather intense) interview to make Lia doubt that assessment. She was grateful for that. Karen was, for the moment, on her side, and the older woman would carry the point of getting Anna to look at what she had sent with her.

  Anna had always been adamant that you couldn’t unsee things, and she was right. That didn’t, however, mean that you couldn’t erase them. Lia was certain that the people Meredyth had employed would be less than helpful at recreating their version of Glimpse when faced with a blank slate (helped by the fact that she had been the one doing most of the work for months). Given the tools that Lia had provided, Anna could crash it. She knew Anna could do it. She had handed her everything that she should need to make it happen - -because it was Anna, and she never
had any doubts about what Anna could do to computers as long as she had the proper equipment and information with which to work. Anna hadn’t let her down yet, and she didn’t think that she would start now.

  Besides, tweaking and modifications and people who really just didn’t get what they were doing working on it all aside, it was still (at its base) Anna’s program. Anna knew everything there was to know about the base for that reason. Once she was through the layers that had been added, she could make it do whatever she wanted -- including getting it to self-destruct. It had to work. She just hoped that they would all forgive her for being the one to let them down at the end of it all. If Karen’s reaction was any indication, then she was probably persona no grata with the others -- likely worse because it would be personal for the others in a way that it wasn’t for Karen.

  Kyle was probably still reeling from what she had done with the Lansing information. She would think about that later -- thinking about Kyle now would do nothing but muddle the picture further. She knew he would be getting an explanation at least -- that had to be good enough (and it was more than she had counted on). She would be grateful for Karen’s pushiness at some point when she had time to be grateful for anything. She had to make sure that Karen got off the premises before Wyatt got any more of his brilliant ideas about making Meredyth’s inconveniences disappear. That thought made her move faster.

  Someday, if she ended up on the winning side of history and anyone anywhere ever knew the details of her story, then some misguided yet well-meaning person would probably slap a label of “selfless” on her actions. That would be really, really sad. There wasn’t anything even remotely selfless about the choices that Lia had been making. She was, in point of fact, being undeniably and unapologetically selfish. She was bullying her way through her chosen course of action with a single mindedness that didn’t leave any room for much recognition of how it was affecting other people let alone putting those possibilities under consideration when she decided what to do next. She was doing what she saw needed to be done when she saw it needed doing the way she decided it needed to be done. That didn’t leave a lot of room for consideration of others -- not that she didn’t find herself thinking about how each item on her checklist would be perceived by the people whose opinion actually mattered to her.

  Those were the thoughts that haunted the otherwise quiet moments when she had nothing else with which to distract her thoughts. Therefore, she made sure that there weren’t many quiet moments. She had too much to do in far too precarious of a situation to dwell on and get lost in what she was giving up and what she might be doing to the people she was giving it up for -- hurting Anna didn’t matter, hurting Connor didn’t matter, and hurting Kyle didn’t matter. What they thought or felt or how they reacted to what she had done when everything was over didn’t matter. That Meri existed in some sort of semi-delusional world where they were some sort of close siblings who were working together for a common goal and that Lia was using that fact against the woman who had been the only family that had bothered about her for a very long time didn’t matter. That thought had come out of nowhere, and she shook it off as quickly as it came.

  It didn’t matter what type of a reflective mood she cycled down into (when she had time for said cycling). Meredyth was not someone she was going to feel guilty over -- sorry for her that she had made the choices that she had made when she could have had such better options maybe, but she was not going to feel guilt when it came to her sister. Her, she reminded herself, world domination wanting, okay with her husband killing people, sister drugging sister. There would be guilt sometime later for Anna and Connor and most especially Kyle, but there would not be any for Meredyth.

  None of it mattered right now. That she actually accomplished what she had set out to accomplish was what mattered. No, there was nothing selfless involved in the decisions she was making and the actions she was taking. She didn’t care what she put anybody else through as long as it all worked out the way that she wanted. (There were times when it was quite clear to her that she and Meri were far more alike than she had hoped.) She was really hoping that she ended up on the winning side of history, but she would hate to be mislabeled in the course of the telling.

  Connor had told her once that if they did everything right and managed to make it all work out the way that it should, then no one outside their immediate circle would ever know what they had done. That’s what she was hoping would happen. She was hoping that it all worked the way it should -- the way she had gambled on it working. She was hoping that there would be no well-meaning historians because there would never be a reason to know how desperately their intervention had been needed. She would hope that history would forget that she was ever involved, but she was kind of hoping that history would never realize how close to disaster everything had been.

  She shrugged off whispering voices that chanted phrases about being doomed to repeat the history that you didn’t comprehend. She couldn’t think about that now. She could only deal with a finite number of problems at any given time, and she was pretty sure that she was already at her limit. She didn’t care to test the accuracy of that belief. Her conversation with Karen began to run on a rather obnoxious loop in the back of her head, but she couldn’t seem to make it shut down.

  Could that have gone down in any more of a clichéd manner? There they had been -- Karen the indignant accuser while Lia stood there as the gracious (okay, so maybe not so gracious), misunderstood, wrongfully accused stepping in to declare her innocence and fix the seemingly insurmountable problem in front of the group of protagonists in one fell swoop.

  This, however, wasn’t a piece of clichéd fiction. This was her life. She wasn’t the put upon princess trapped in a tower self-sacrificingly giving herself up to give the others a chance. She was just a teenage girl who had backed herself into a corner and was living with the consequences. She wasn’t trapped -- not really, not in the physical sense of the word. In theory, she could go through the front door and walk away at any time (she could probably even lift a set of keys and use one of the cars in the garage without much additional effort).

  She could quit. She didn’t have to be responsible, but she was going to be. The time for backing out had come and gone earlier on -- back before she had handed Meredyth what she wanted on a silver platter in an attempt to get her sister to let her in the middle of things where she had a chance of doing some actual, significant damage. It had been a gamble, and Lia had no delusions about the ability of gambling to backfire on you. She couldn’t walk away. It wasn’t an option. She was the one who had been doing the gambling, and she had been doing it with things that weren’t hers to gamble. If it went wrong, then she was the one who would have to stick it out and see if there weren’t any other means that she could employ to fix it.

  She would wait. She would ease things along to make sure that Karen got out of here before Wyatt decided that what Meredyth didn’t know didn’t matter and that he could chance the backlash or before Meredyth got back and decided that Karen needed a trip to some sort of drug induced la la land (since Meredyth seemed to have decided that that was a lovely way to go about tackling one’s problems). She would be here if Anna didn’t make her plan work (which wasn’t going to happen because it was Anna even if she did have to plan for all contingencies -- that was part of the whole gambling with things that weren’t yours to gamble with repercussions).