Page 71 of Gifted & Talented

“Wehaveheard from the Wrenfare board,” Arthur pointed out. “A lot of them were at that little grief soiree you threw last night. I think they expect the new CEO to come to a shareholders’ vote, pending Dad’s distribution of his majority.”

“The most reasonable outcome is your father passing on his shares to the three of you equally,” Gillian agreed, sounding very lawyerly. Eilidh routinely forgot that Gillian had once been a lawyer, except that whenever she remembered, it all made perfect sense. “They’ll likely try to sway the three of you to the CEO of their choosing.”

“Assuming Daddy Dearest didn’t leave all his shares to justoneperson.” Meredith was now looking at Eilidh as if Eilidh had threatened Meredith with a knife. “In which case that person could very easily tell the board to fuck off, assuming they had the balls.”

“Well, yes,” Gillian mildly agreed. “That’s an alternative outcome.”

Arthur looked at Eilidh; Meredith looked willfully away.

“I don’t think there’s much point to speculating about it until you know for sure,” said Dzhuliya, in an apparent attempt to pacify the situation. Unlikely she could grasp the full extent of the tension or how constant it was, but Eilidh appreciated the effort all the same. It made the thing in her chest give a little flutter, an insect thrum. “Did the lawyers say when they’d get back to you?” Dzhuliya asked Arthur.

“They said they’d call tomorrow,” he said, gesturing to the phone in his hand. “Apparently they should have a judgment in the morning and then they’ll let us know in person.” His phone buzzed again, the screen lighting up as he glanced at it. Half a smile quirked across his face, which Eilidh noticed that Gillian did not miss. She wore another thoughtful look, though it was substantially more focused this time. She was no longer thinking into the ether, but somewhere much closer to earth.

“Oh, you’re all here!” exclaimed Yves, who bounded into the kitchen shirtless from the front door. He was chipper and gleaming, a little sweat-slicked. “I have just been running among the trees. Have you seen them?” he asked, presumably of Eilidh, who was closest to the door and whom he was looking at directly.

“The… trees?” Eilidh echoed.

“Yes!” said Yves, beaming.

“Any specific trees?” demanded Meredith.

“No, no, I couldn’t possibly choose favorites. Oh, thank you!” he said as Gillian held a glass of water out for him, which she had apparently just poured. “Oh, you should try this,” he added to Eilidh as he sidled past her, reaching for the glass from Gillian’s hand.

“Water?” asked Eilidh, again bemused, as Yves downed the entire glass in one prolonged gulp. She glanced at Arthur, who was busy typing into his phone.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” declared Yves, like a toddler or a commercial spokesperson.

“Anyway,” Meredith announced, “if that’s all, can we circle back on this at a later time?”

“Lawyers aside, there’s still the matter of the funeral,” Gillian pointed out, handing Yves another glass of water. She looked a little flushed as Yves gave her a slavish look of gratitude.

“Okay,” said Meredith doubtfully. “Anything specific?”

“Well, I know Eilidh’s the executor, but it’s likely there will be a lot to arrange,” Gillian said. “It might be more productive to divvy up all the relevant tasks.”

Meredith shrugged. “Fine. I can handle it.”

“Dzhuliya can help,” said Eilidh quickly, spotting an opportunity. The more they kept Dzhuliya involved, the more natural it would feel to reward her with job security regardless of who took over. Which, by the way, was Eilidh’s only goal for keeping Dzhuliya around! Certainly no ulterior motives.

Probably. “Right?” Eilidh asked, giving Dzhuliya a plaintive look she hoped read as helpful.

“Oh… yes, of course.” A funny, slightly wary looked passed from Dzhuliya to Eilidh for a moment, but then Dzhuliya reached tentatively for Gillian’s cheese plate. “May I?”

“Of course,” Gillian said in an unusually purry voice. “Brie?”

“My goodness, Arthur, you should have woken me!” came the voice of Lady Philippa from the corridor. At the sound, the thing inside Eilidh reached up to somewhere in her jaw—she grit her teeth, attempting to remain well-hinged. She tried to hide the effort for Arthur’s sake, though Meredith characteristically made no effort to conceal her own eye roll.

“Gillian,” Philippa said, “you truly have a gift, you’re a natural hostess.” At least Philippa did seem genuine in her praise, although what room would there have been for inauthenticity? It was true, Gillian was blessed by the cheese plate gods. Eilidh had hardly noticed when she’d begun reaching for handfuls of candied pistachios, absentmindedly snacking away.

Dzhuliya’s hand brushed hers, ever so lightly, beside the tiny brioche toasts. The thing in Eilidh’s chest roared incongruously, as if Dzhuliya had pinned her to the counter. As if Dzhuliya had pressed a cheese knife coolly to the inside of her thigh.

(Amicable! Colleagues!)

“Oh, it’s really nothing,” said Gillian, looking the way she did when someone else was praising her research. Not that Eilidh had taken much of an interest in Gillian’s dissertation, but Thayer had always made a point to bring it up whenever they were all together.

It occurred to Eilidh then that, actually, Thayer had quite liked Gillian. He hadn’t at first—he’d assumed Gillian was some fleeting whim of Arthur’s and regarded her with suspicion, interpreting her completely ordinaryeconomic background as something of a gold-digging threat, particularly when it became clear that she intended to stop working as an attorney—but even he came to understand that whatever Gillian could insidiously want from Arthur she either already had or could get on her own. As far as Eilidh could tell, Gillian was a much-lauded star in her doctoral program, and as politician’s wives went, she was utterly flawless. During the year of Arthur’s unexpected rise in popularity (followed by his million-to-one win), Gillian Wren was a celebrated figure in American media—none of which remotely changed her. She did not, it was clear,needArthur, and as soon as Thayer had understood that, he’d come to see his daughter-in-law for what she was: a whip-smart, elegant young woman who seemed to genuinely like his son. “Of course, what specifically she sees in him I haven’t the faintest idea,” Thayer had told Eilidh during one of their lunches.

Eilidh assumed he had been joking. “Everyone loves Arthur,” she reminded him, and it was true. Arthur had never been short of girlfriends to Eilidh’s knowledge. That was before Yves, of course, and therefore before Eilidh knew that Arthur had never been short of boyfriends, either. If anything, knowing what she knew now only exacerbated the point. “Even you,” Eilidh added to her father, “when you decide to cut him a little slack for not being like you. Or like Meredith.”

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