Page 95 of Gifted & Talented

“Yes,” said Meredith, and Jamie blinked with surprise, having expected her to deny it. “I mean, what else was any of it, do you know what I mean? They taught me to aim for perfection, but perfection was always impossible. So what else was I going to do?”

“I think there’s a difference between falling short of perfection and actively lying,” Jamie wryly observed.

“But it wasn’t a lie.”

“Right.” Jamie turned away with a scoff, and they trudged on farther, scaling upward.

“It wasn’t a lie,” Meredith explained, “until it was one.”

Jamie said nothing. Meredith looked down at his hand, the free one lingering between them, the one she could take if only she were someone different; if she’d made every single different choice.

“I did it because I wanted to be happy,” said Meredith. “That’s it, that’s the truth.” She didn’t like the way her voice sounded when she was being sincere. It was unbearable, everything about it. “The research I did—I knew I could fix things, I could make some of it better. And then Tyche showed me what it would mean if I couldreallydo it, if I could make this idea better, or bolder somehow, and I wanted it, so I did it. I wanted to will it into being, and so I did.”

Jamie looked at her. “You believed in the prophecy even though you knew it was a lie?”

“It didn’t feel like a lie.” She looked away. “I was twenty-five. I didn’t know anything.”

“Twenty-five is a whole-ass adult, Meredith.”

“You said thirty was a baby!”

“That was different. You’re not supposed to know what the future is or what destiny means or what the point is of being alive. But you’re definitely not supposed to defraud your investors.”

“I wasn’t thinking about defrauding anyone, I wasn’t thinking about fraud at all. I was thinking that—”

She stopped.

“I was thinking you were gone,” she said slowly, “and I was never going to feel that way again, and I’d already turned my back on my father, so the only important thing was to do what I’d set out to do, to make everything I’d given up, you know,worth it,and it didn’t seem at first like this was the road I was on until it was too late. In the moment—” She exhaled. “I don’t know. I just went a little bit crazy, I think. I just thought… I can’t fail. Ican’tfail. Even if Chirp is turning into something different than I wanted. Even if I’m turning into something I don’t like. The worse the lie got, the more I had to protect it. This is all I am, this is all I have, this thing is my life, it’s my legacy, it’s the only thing that will make my father proud of me, it’s—”

Another hard stop.

“Yeah, I believed in the fairy tale,” she said eventually, witheringly. “I just wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe I could do it—that everything everyone had always told me I was capable of was real, and honest, and true.”

To her utter mortification, she felt tears pricking her eyes. Her vision swam, and it wasn’t just the stye this time.

“I’m not a genius,” she said. “I’m an idiot. And I will go down as an idiot and a criminal when all I wanted to do wasfixsomething, tohelpsomeone—”

She stopped, pausing on a particularly narrow edge of the path and wondering how she could even put it into words, the fear that drove her. The way she was so terrified of losing something, something she didn’t really even have, because what wasgenius? What was being called a prodigy—it was just an idea, just a prediction, and then what came next? What came after being a prodigy except for failure, except for misery, except for a life without Jamie? Jamie, the only person she loved with that kind of wildness, with the sort of chaos she never allowed into her life. Jamie who betrayed her, Jamie who didn’t love her enough to save her, Jamie who only loved her for being hard and ambitious and mean when she didn’t want to be any of those things, she had only ever wanted to be soft for him, but she wasn’t soft, she couldn’t be soft, she didn’t know how? She didn’t know how to be Eilidh, fucking Eilidh who was art itself, who could bring the hardest man to tears just over the way she exuded her pain, how she lived it so honestly. So vulnerably, with her whole self.

What did Eilidh have that Meredith couldn’t mimic, no matter how hard she tried? It was something innate, some innocence, some honesty that Meredith had never been allowed. She didn’t want to analyze the psychology of it, she knew there was something to validate her feelings, but god, what a fucking waste of time.

Had Jamie seen children with her? Had he wanted to grow old with her? Was he even capable of understanding that Meredith didn’t want to grow old, had never wanted to, had thought she was destined for a life just like her mother’s, right up until the day she met him? Could Jamie ever know, could he everreally knowthat he had made Meredith want to grow oldforhim? So that she would never have to miss a minute. So that everything of hers would also be his.

Maybe it wouldn’t be happiness all the time, but by god it would be theirs, and unrobbable. Not like money. Not like success.

Nobody could ever take it away from her but Jamie, Jamie himself.

He took a few steps past her, lingering on the edge of the path, looking over the precipice into the creek below. They were nearing the top of the trail, reaching one of the upper roads. She sidled up to him and stood there looking down, contemplating the fall.

“Didn’t you worry for even a second that I would hate you for this?”she asked him. She didn’t know what made her do it, but she had to ask. She had to know if it had ever crossed his mind—if he had decided that her hatred was worth the risk, or worse, if the thought had never actually occurred to him.

He looked at her, and she remembered that she had been close enough to read him once. Once upon a time he had telegraphed everything she needed to know with a glance, like they’d been made from the same stuff. Like before Babel had fallen, some prior versions of themselves were laid in the same brick, sharing the same mortar, such that they’d always been able to speak the same language no matter what forms they took. She remembered the work she’d all but fucked off, the readings she hadn’t done, because a minute of time spent with Jamie was so much more potent, so much fuller than a minute spent fighting sleep in a lecture hall. She never saw her future in Magitech 101 or Biomancy 120. She saw itall the timewhenever she was with Jamie, and that was the fuckery of it, the future of absolute nothingness she knew that she would choose if given the opportunity. The greatness she would no longer care if she achieved. There was no resolving the tension, the inharmonious knowledge that she would never love again like this if she didn’t drop everything right that moment for this one person, this incredible human she would never find if she searched a thousand years, for eons on eons—but that if shediddo it, if she chose that version of herself with its uncomplicated softness and kindness and warmth, she would be robbing someone she loved even more at the time, which was herself, and more specifically, the person she felt she needed to be. The person her mother could have been grateful to; the person who would have made a worthy sacrifice for her mother’s pain.

If she did not becomeMeredith Wren,if she chose that weak-kneed alter ego instead, then what was any of it for?

It was not in Meredith’s material to ask what price Jamie might have paid, or what he would have been willing to pay. She knew she would accept the lie if he offered her one, which was the same as not really caring about the truth. What could he have said back then to convince her to stay? He had said it all, that he wanted forever, that it didn’t matter what he achieved or didn’t achieve so long as she was there, so long as she chose him. The last fight wasn’t even a fight, it was a proposal. It was supplication, an actual pledge of fealty, literally down on bended knee.

But that was years ago. So when Jamie looked at her, she reminded herselfthat she no longer knew him. He took a sip from his coffee and looked away, half a smile on his face. A wry twist of irony.

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