Page 36 of Gifted & Talented

“God, I’d kill you right now for a latte,” she said, apparently having finished with the matter of grief. “Can you believe Dad doesn’t have any coffee in the house?”

“I’m sorry, just to clarify,” said Arthur, “your price for my murder is a cup of coffee, something you could procure by tapping a few buttons on your phone?”

There was an unexpected interjection from the doorway. “He was trying to drink less caffeine,” said Eilidh, who nearly startled Arthur into knocking over the ridiculous pillar that was being used as a side table. (Now that he’d noticed the house had been designed by someone and did not express any sort of secrets as to who his father was or wished that Arthur would be, he considered it the height of excess. He and Gillian had not hired a decorator because that was absurd and wildly bourgeois. Everything in Arthur’s home was a piece made by a local artist—Arthur’s doing, although, come to think of it, Gillian was the one who’d sourced it all.)

“That’s ridiculous,” said Meredith instantly, as though Eilidh had suggested their father was in the process of converting to Anglicanism or currently blowing prostitutes on the moon. “As if he would have done anything to purposefully decrease his productivity. He ran this place like a machine.”

Eilidh gave a gesture like a shrug, though it was stiffer than that. “He was doing wheatgrass shots every day. It was a whole wellness thing he was trying. He said it was helping with his energy levels.”

“I’m sorry, he was doing wheatgrass? Grass, like a cow?” Meredith was frowning at her. It is of course very common knowledge that wheatgrass shots are considered wellness boosters, but try telling that to Meredith Wren.

Eilidh did, unwisely. “It’s good for digestion. And concentration.”

“Are you also eating grass now?” demanded Meredith.

“He wasn’teatingit,” Eilidh sighed, “and it’s notgrass—”

“So who do you think he left the company to?” asked Arthur, pondering it aloud on a whim. Eilidh and Meredith had forgotten him for a moment, and turned to him then as if he’d recently grown an extra head. “Do you think it’ll be left to one of us?”

“This isn’t a monarchy, Brother Delusional,” said Meredith instantly—defensively? Perhaps. Arthur understood immediately that she’d been drafting contingency plans in her head since the moment Thayer passed. “It’s merit based. Has to be. You can’t throw five trillion dollars into someone’s lap just because you share some DNA.”

“Is that a fake number?” asked Eilidh.

“So you’re ruling all of us out based on merit?” asked Arthur, who knew his sister too well to be personally insulted.

“I didn’t say that.” Meredith lifted her chin, pointedly overlooking Eilidh’s unfamiliarity with Wrenfare’s valuation (Arthur didn’t know the exact number, but somewhere in the trillions sounded believable, and not simply because Meredith had said so with confidence). “I just don’t see the point in phrasing it that way, as if he’s some kind of mad king with the power to confer an entire company unto whichever of us he liked most.”

“So you think it’s Eilidh,” concluded Arthur, prompting Eilidh to once again put on a one-woman performance of total indifference. Not that Arthur disagreed with Meredith on the matter of Thayer’s favorite child, as there was no plausible margin of error there. “You think he was grooming her for the CEO job, then? I thought she worked in marketing.”

“I’m right here,” said Eilidh.

“Well, if he was giving up caffeine, maybe he was,” scoffed Meredith, as if their father had wasted away to dementia rather than dying of a sudden stroke the previous day. “Who knows if he was even thinking clearly toward the end.”

“But you told me on the phone that you thought it would be me,” Eilidh pointed out, apparently torn between being grievously offended and undermining the logic of Meredith’s argument.

“You did?” asked Arthur, who didn’t disagree with that assumption, but hadn’t realized Meredith could accept it.

“Just because I expect the worst doesn’t mean I’m incapable of hoping for a better option,” said Meredith, leaving Eilidh to blink very rapidly, as if processing a wide variety of thoughts. “There’s still a chance that our father’s absurd personal bias miraculously failed to compromise his better judgment, however slim that possibility might be,” Meredith muttered, touching her eye again in that weird, slightly bothered way.

“Have you considered that he might have left it to me?” asked Arthur, pausing Eilidh’s response—unclear what it would have been—and leaving her to turn to turn to him with a frown.

“You?” echoed Eilidh, an unspoken lambasting that Arthur read with perfect clarity. “But you have a job,” she added, a flimsy effort at repair.

“Well, what if I preferredthisjob?” asked Arthur, light-footedly, as if it did not matter and had only just occurred to him sometime in the last five seconds. “I’m tired of Congress anyway.”

“I did consider it,” Meredith remarked, to everyone’s surprise. It was a refreshingly generous position until she continued, “Idefinitelyconsidered that our father might think it best to bestow his life’s work and entire earthly purpose unto the one person in this family who has never set foot anywhere near the magitech industry.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t have to ask this,” Eilidh sighed, turning to Meredith before Arthur could speak, “but are you saying you think the best option is you?”

“Of course not,” said Meredith with a highly put-on indifference. “I’m saying the best option is whoever can best take the reins at Wrenfare, which might very well be a third party. I imagine—knowing as we all do the significance of the company to the industry as a whole,” she pointed out, before adding casually, as if it were forgettable and unimportant, “and how much Dad cared about Wrenfare—his successor must be someone who has previously shown success as a CEO. I’m sure he must have considered any number of people who are currently head of a comparatively valuable magitech venture.”

“So, you,” Arthur ruled, as Eilidh nodded vigorously.

“I didn’t say that,” sniffed Meredith.

“Of course you didn’t, Sister Subtle,” said Arthur.

“I don’t know what you mean, Brother Obtuse—”

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