Page 115 of Gifted & Talented

“Well, he couldn’t, Meredith. Tyche simply had more money. We’ve been on a backslide for the last decade, if not more. Thayer could never have matched Kip’s offer.”

A doozy of a sudden revelation. Privately, Meredith felt a soaring sense that maybe, just maybe, her father had never actually intended to undermine her. Maybe Thayer had always believed Meredith was gifted—maybe he had known she was capable of greatness after all, and he had been saddened that she’d torn herself away from him, choosing instead to stand with a man he considered a rival.

“Unfortunately, I think it was all too clear that Merritt knew what he was doing when he used Kip Hughes to buy Thayer Wren’s daughter out from under him,” Ed continued, shattering Meredith’s burgeoning internal aria of relief. “Much of the board admires what Kip has done for Tyche, but Thayer knew—and I agreed—that Merritt would grind the Wren name into the dust at the first chance he got, purely out of some juvenile misguided spite. He did it with you, and would clearly do it again with Wrenfare.”

The result of this insane decentering of Meredith’s talent as any meaningful piece in the ongoing Merritt-Thayer enmity was a cool, insidious flood of disappointment. “That’s what my father thought? That his former partner just wanted the Wren name however he could get it?”

“I can’t say all was friendly between them,” Ed said.

“But Tyche didn’t buyme. They invested in Chirp.” God, Meredith thought, I’m an idiot. I put my whole worth on this thing, this one project, this one dream, I let first one man and then the other give me meaning. But it was a dick-measuring contest all along.

“Well, of course,” said Ed pleasantly. “I’m just expressing that I don’t believe a deal with Tyche was ever really on the table for your father. However, there are plenty of investors who’d likely pay a premium—for example, a very reputable technomancy company based in Beijing, not to mention a group of highly savvy investors from Saudi Arabia—”

“Can we talk shop after my father’s ashes are cold?” asked Meredith.

“Oh, Meredith, absolutely. I just—” Ed hesitated. “Meredith. I’ve known you since you were a little girl. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to bring this up. But.”

Meredith’s organs twisted slightly.

“There is a bit of a rumble about Chirp going around. And there is a possibility that if things become litigiously difficult, the board may be forced to call for a vote.”

To remove her, he meant. They didn’t want mess and she was mess. Thayer had always emphasized that no one liked her, that no one would give her the benefit of the doubt if she ever performed less than spectacularly, and she had treated that like a battle cry, a personal demand for perfection, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even a warning. Thayer wasn’t different! He wasone of them—one of the doubters, the haters. There was no chance he thought the board would stick by her, whether it was Thayer’s dying wish or not. Thayer must have known she’d go down with a flaming pile of shit in each hand. How better to destroy the daughter who betrayed you than to let the whole world watch her prove herself a snake? If the rivalry with Tyche had never been about Meredith, this decision must have been the opposite. It was Thayer flipping her off, telling her to reap what she sowed. To prove that the one thing she’d always wanted to be good enough for was impossible, because even when he gave it to her, she still couldn’t hold it for long.

She stared at her father’s artwork, the ballerina on the wall. The shadow of a man standing leeringly in the background. All her life her father had been preparing her for this—for the men who didn’t like her. For the men who wanted, even at the risk of their own profits, to see her fail. She hadn’t fallen in line and inevitably she would suffer for it, and hadn’t Thayer told her that himself? Was she really so surprised that the pettiestI told you sowas worth the price of his own legacy when he had never changed his story, even once?

But then again, his legacy was finished.Hewas dead, but she was not. Fuck his legacy, fuck his aspirations, fuck the glory of the House of Wren that he had chosen to own alone rather than share with her. Eilidh could have destroyed the company just as well, just as soundly, but Thayer hadn’t wanted the blade to fall on the neck of his favorite.

So whyshouldn’tMeredith be the one to burn it down?

“You’re saying you want a quick sale,” Meredith translated over the phone. “Not just quick. Immediate.”

Ed let out a breath of relief. “Well, within reason, of course.”

No. Fuck reason. She had a legal battle to fund.

Take the money,Jamie had said.Take the money and run.

Thanks, Dad, she thought with wrenching sincerity.

“Right. Well, I want to see all offers of sale by end of day,” said Meredith. Thayer had to have known what he’d done when he picked her over Eilidh. He chose the daughter who had never once bent the knee, and if that was purely to protect one child over the other, it didn’t matter. That failure was on him.Thank you, Dad, for raising me strong enough. Fuck you for making me that way.“Including best and final from Kip Hughes.”

Now Ed’s voice carried an edge of concern. “Meredith, there’s no need t—”

“See you at the funeral,” she said, and tapped her earbud to hang up the phone.

65

Eilidh woke up on the morning of her father’s funeral and remembered that she had cursed the world to darkness. She had also slept with the same woman her father had slept with. The whole thing was monumentally upsetting. Dzhuliya had tried to speak with her several times the day before—many times, countless times, following her around like a puppy, saying things like she hadn’t known, it was Eilidh all along, it was a lapse in judgment, that was all.

To say Eilidh didn’t want to hear it was an understatement. “You’re carrying my future sibling,” Eilidh pointed out when it seemed like Dzhuliya really might try to follow her up the stairs, to the bed that Eilidh didn’t want to leave for at least a week. “Don’t you grasp the Greek mythology levels of weird?”

“Eilidh,” Dzhuliya began, and let her hands fall at her sides, because what else was there to say? That in the war between guilt and loneliness, loneliness had won? Because of course loneliness won, it always would, we are all, forever, universally at risk for the pitfalls of craving. But that didn’t mean you handed your dead lover’s daughter a strap-on and said have at it girl, life’s short. There simply had to be a line.

Eventually Eilidh disappeared into her bedroom and didn’t fall asleep for several hours. She thought about texting someone, but upon realizing there was no one to talk to, she didn’t. She and Meredith hadn’t spoken at all since their argument, the one that had led to the swarm.

Eilidh could still feel the thing in her chest sitting heavy, with its back to her like they’d just had a fight. She realized they had really been feeling like two separate entities lately. Hard to believe that earlier in the week, when they’d been 20,000 feet in the air, that little lizard-scuttle of inward madness had actually done her a favor. Its agenda had always seemed separate from Eilidh’s own aspirations for normalcy and/or the tedium of daily life, but now it only seemed to throw tantrum after tantrum.

“Dad,” Eilidh said aloud. It didn’t yet feel impossible that he would answer. How long before she could stop expecting to see him on the stairs? “You gave it all to Meredith.”

---