Page 62 of Gifted & Talented

“My feelings exactly.” Meredith was clearly very angry with Arthur for pretending to die if she was speaking cordially to Eilidh to avoid him. “I swear, she must have done this just to mess with me.”

“It’s not like the internet public record knew we were coming,” Arthur pointed out.

“So? You remember her yearbook quote,” snapped Meredith. “Who knows how long she’s been putting this particular gag in motion!”

“What, on the off chance youhappenedto look for her? She’s notthatobsessed with you,” Arthur countered.

“It’s aWrenfare store,” Meredith said hotly. “This is exactly what Lou would find funny!”

“You haven’t spoken to her in what, thirteen years? More?” said Arthur. “Maybe you don’t know what she finds funny anymore.”

“And you do?” groused Meredith.

“No,” said Arthur. But it wasn’t the beginning of the argument, Eilidh observed. It wasn’t even particularly irritable. It was really just… sad.

Meredith didn’t say anything.

After a few minutes, Gillian emerged from the shopping center. She pulled open the door to the back seat and handed Meredith back her phone. “Here,” she said. “The manager wasn’t confident about who I was asking for. They said Maria de León doesn’t work today, but this is the address she has on file.”

“They just gave you her home address?” Eilidh asked, watching Meredith frown at the screen.

“For legal reasons it’s really best if you don’t press me on my methods,” Gillian replied, to which Arthur nodded before looking up in thought.

“Wait, manager of what?” asked Arthur. Meredith continued staring hard at the address on the phone in silence.

“That Wrenfare store,” said Gillian.

“Which one?” asked Arthur.

“That one.” Gillian pointed.

“I don’t understand,” said Arthur.

“Well, all I know is that a woman named Maria de León works at that Wrenfare store, so unless your public record search was for someone else, then this is probably the work address for the woman you’re looking for,” Gillian said in such earnestly informative tones that Eilidh wondered how she could even be alive. Had Gillian ever received a concept with any sense of its inherent comedy? Not that Eilidh knew Gillian well, but she was so wildly, impossibly indifferent to the absurdities of any given situation that it occasionally seemed like she couldn’t be experiencing life in real time.

“But Lou is a genius,” said Meredith, scouring the parking lot with a look of unfiltered venom, waiting for the producers to suddenly appear and announce it had all been a prank. “She went to one of the best technomancy programs in the country. She sold her first start-up for almost a billion dollars.Andshe can do magic nobody else can do.”

“That’s true,” said Arthur, nodding vigorously as if someone had asked him to fact-check Meredith’s statement.

“So then maybe this isn’t her,” Gillian suggested, seemingly undimmed.

Meredith made a face that was equal parts repulsion and bemusement, like she had just been told that if she thought about it hard enough, she could set fire to something with her mind.

“Maria is a common name,” Gillian pointed out in a secondary attempt to be helpful.

“But… a Wrenfare store,” said Meredith, with no change in tone.

“Maybe she has a gambling problem,” suggested Arthur. “Or she’s an alcoholic?”

“Maybe,” Meredith said, sounding soothed by the possibility that a genius working retail might be suffering from prodigious personal catastrophe.

“Or maybe it’s not her, and the whole thing is just a coincidence,” Gillian repeated. “Would you like me to drive? I’m happy to just go to that address and find out,” she added. “I don’t want us to get back too late. You know, because of the lawyers.”

She said that last bit as if it was very important, which Eilidh felt they’d already established wasn’t the case. She didn’t know what else Gillian wouldbe in a hurry to get back to, though, and didn’t comment on it except to add, “I agree, let’s just go.”

Eilidh wondered if she had a personal opinion on any of this. It did curdle something in her a little bit to hear that Lou, whom both Meredith and Arthur thought so highly of, might be depressingly underemployed at a Wrenfare, but it bothered Eilidh specifically becauseshewas depressingly underemployed by Wrenfare, and now—for fun—she got to really understand that her siblings, despite vying for ownership of the very same company, considered that level of employment to be a fate worse than alcoholism. A tragedy, that’s what it was to them, and a waste. And the fact that Eilidh knew exactly how they felt about it meant that it was exactly how she saw herself.

So it was a punch to the gut, and Eilidh couldn’t decide whether she wanted them to be wrong—for this whole day to be a waste of time becauseof courseLou was someone important, some president or CEO or something who couldn’t be found by public record because she had paid for that sort of thing to go away—or for them to be right, so that Eilidh could ask her what went wrong and how to fix it.

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