Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy

  Part of her was glad that Meredyth was gone when Karen came not so surreptiously slipping in among them -- it bought her more time. Part of her was nervous about what would happen if Meredyth hadn’t returned by the time that Anna had managed to accomplish what Lia had asked of her (if she accomplished, when she accomplished, the words exchanged places on a revolving basis in Lia’s head). She had every confidence in Anna, but she couldn’t hold the other woman responsible if there was some problem in Lia’s planning and set up programming that she hadn’t managed to foresee.

  Wyatt without Meredyth to mitigate was becoming increasingly difficult to predict. The man with whom she had reached a grudging understanding during the prewedding events so long ago (even if it wasn’t really so long ago as it felt) wasn’t one she would have predicted would take the path that he had taken when it came to the “needing dealing with” people as she had heard him once say to Meredyth. She didn’t know what had changed. She didn’t know what she hadn’t seen that had obviously (now anyway) been lurking there. He was obsessive with keeping obstacles out of Meredyth’s way whenever he could (he had made that clear to Lia on more than one occasion when Meredyth wasn’t around to hear him tell her that he was watching and waiting for her to screw up).

  Her fingers of her left hand began rubbing at her right wrist in a nervous motion that she had developed as it healed. Breaks repaired, but it still ached upon occasion. It probably always would. Like the ache in her wrist that lingered (or the left far behind memory of when he had yanked her around by fingers wrapped in her hair), the memory of an angry Wyatt didn’t really fade. An angry Wyatt was a dangerous Wyatt, but a Wyatt that thought he had a clear path to keep his wife from being threatened was deadly. There were, she knew, two for sure. There was one more that she suspected but couldn’t confirm. They would be avoiding the addition of a fourth from Karen’s ill-advised (yet helpful) foray into the middle of things.

  Karen should be safe enough for the time being, and safe from Wyatt altogether. It wasn’t like she wouldn’t be missed. It wasn’t like she was one of the chosen specifically because they were dispensable people that Wyatt chose when he needed someone else to handle one of their “projects” that he couldn’t be involved in personally. Getting rid of Karen Wyatt’s way would be more backlash to them than they would be willing to deal with, and getting rid of Karen Meredyth’s way would require more time than Lia was going to give them. Meredyth might even be sensible enough to know that there wasn’t anything Karen could tell Connor that he didn’t already know and simply let her be on her way. That method, however, wasn’t guaranteed and wouldn’t allow Karen to walk out with anything from the house, and Lia really, really needed her to walk out with that jump drive for Anna.

  Then, there was the fact that Wyatt was getting to be nothing short of unstable. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time could be disastrous, and Lia had done all the gambling with things that weren’t hers to gamble that she was going to do. Karen needed to be out of here as quickly as she could make it happen. You just didn’t take chances with Wyatt. He was already antsy about Karen. That wouldn’t improve when Karen suddenly disappeared out from under his nose. If other things came to light on top of that in a relatively short time frame, then she couldn’t be sure how her brother-in-law would respond.

  She shook off those thoughts. It didn’t matter. Wyatt would do whatever Wyatt was going to do. It would happen when it happened. She had other things to do right now. She had other things that required all of her attention. She would worry about Wyatt when she had to and not before. First things first, the security cameras needed to be dealt with -- she already knew how to do that. It wouldn’t be difficult; it wouldn’t take long. She would start with simple and work her way toward hard. Karen came first. Getting Karen to Anna came first. Everything else could wait, and it did.

  Wyatt hadn’t exactly been pleasant about the woman’s disappearance, but he couldn’t throw any accusations at Lia when the security team themselves had claimed that some sort of a power surge had knocked out the cameras. He had been mostly calm, and Lia decided that he too had realized that she couldn’t go anywhere with anything that she might (or might not) have seen during her time in the house that mattered. Connor was most assuredly under the heading of “didn’t matter” in Wyatt’s world. He was right, from his perspective, to not worry overmuch about her. There was, in fact, nothing that she could tell Connor about Wyatt and Meredyth and their dealings that he didn’t already know -- what she could show him, well, that was a different story.

  Wyatt, however, had no way of knowing that. Now, Lia just had to wait. This was, of course, easier said than done. She was very much missing her necklace. She wanted the comfort of the sliding back and forth of the pendant on the chain during the hours that she spent waiting for something, anything to come to life on the screen and let her know (one way or the other) how things had gone. She didn’t have the necklace though, and the comfort of that repetitive motion was out of her reach. The comfort of what the necklace represented, however, was something that she was never without.