Page 20 of One Year Ago in Spain
Incredibly unattractive,she thought.
And then,But who even cares?
The laptop chimed four more times.
She crawled over to retrieve it from the desk. The carpet left a disconcerting, grimy tackiness on her skin, like rug cleaner thathadn’t been quite washed out, mixed with several decades of the dirt off other people’s shoes.
On the laptop screen, the Windsor & Black internal chat channel was all lit up. There weren’t just a few notes from her friends, but also hundreds—no, probably thousands—of messages she’d missed since she’d fled the office in the middle of the call with Mitch from Intelligentsia. Mergers didn’t stop just because one cog was missing, but in this case, Claire was an incredibly important cog. The one in the center of it all. And that meant everyone had questions, because she hadn’t had time to share any information before she’d had to drop everything and fly to Madrid.
But then, work could be good. It might keep her mind distracted.
She decided to go downstairs. Claire wanted to set parameters for herself, to keep from breaking down again, and being in public would help. She hated crying in public; the flight over had been mortifying, and so had collapsing at the hospital when she’d first been denied access to Matías. Claire was used to keeping her vulnerability under lock and key, and the recent overexposure had left her feeling too raw.
So she closed her laptop and headed back to the lobby. Next to reception, the hotel’s café had plenty of open seats because it was only open for breakfast and lunch, and it was just after 9p.m.now. Claire set herself up at a table that had a view of the street through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows, still flooded with the light of the slowly setting sun. She opened her laptop and dove into responding to merger questions. There were a number of “so sorry to hear” and “wishes for a speedy recovery” notes from colleagues who were acquaintances, not friends.George had been the one to book her plane ticket while Claire raced to her apartment to pack, so she supposed word had gotten around the firm by now about what happened. Still, she resolutely ignored those messages of sympathy in favor of the purely practical.
What is the status of open items in Disclosure Schedule 5(b)(ii)?
She quickly typed a reply.
The Freshfields team in London is following up on the assignment clause in the Cunningham contract and will have an update to us by Monday close of business GMT.
Claire, do you remember where we landed on sublicensing Einstein’s “Project Titanium” database to Sine Wave Enterprises?
Two-year sublicense, butnon-exclusive. $150K per month.
Not sure if we can get the Czech apostilles in time for closing this deal in two weeks.
Reach out to Anežka Cerný in the Prague office. She’s a paralegal and has contacts in the notary community who can fast track this for us.
As expected, it helped to sit in the cockpit and feel like she was in control of something. Here in the middle of this merger, Claire was Puppet Master of the Universe. She understood everydetail. She knew all the players and the timing and how to avert disaster when things went wrong. She had worked on enough deals in her career that she could preempt problems before they arose, and when something unexpected happened, she had the experience to come up with a solution. Unlike with—
Unbidden, her thoughts went to Matías, lying still and broken in the hospital.
Tears started leaking out of her eyes even though they weren’tallowedto. She was in public, goddammit!
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckfuck!
She couldn’t do this by herself. The last time this happened—when her parents had died—Claire had at least still been living near her college campus, and not everyone had scattered yet after graduation. There were friends’ shoulders to cry on; people who would bring her chocolate cake from the twenty-four-hour grocery store in the middle of the night.
But now Claire was in an unfamiliar country, where she knew no one except future family members she’d only met a few times via video calls. And she couldn’t even go to a bakery to buyherselfchocolate cake since she’d never learned the Spanish word for cake. It didn’t occur to her that she could just point at a cake in the display case, because…because…
“Ineedyou, Matías,” she whispered even as she angled her body away from reception because one of the women there was already looking her way, concerned.
For almost a year, whenever Claire was stressed or when something went wrong, Matías was the one who grounded her and made her feel safe. With him, she could feel like the world would be okay, that whatever she was freaking out about could and would resolve itself. He always believed fiercely thateverything would turn out for the best, even if that “best” wasn’t at all what you had imagined it to be.
But the crisis right now was Matías himself, and he couldn’t be there to help Claire through it.
Her computer dinged again, but she was too far down the well of grief for work to save her now. She slammed the laptop lid shut and curled her fingers into fists, as if she could hang on to hope and Matías by the strength of her grip alone.
Her fingernails dug into her flesh.
Her left hand tingled, and suddenly she remembered.
Matías, his lips warm against her skin.
This kiss is for you to keep until I come home, so you can carry me with you while I’m gone. But if you find yourself missing me too much, just press your lips against your palm and imagine your kiss meeting mine, and I’ll be right here with you.
Through her tears, Claire unfurled her fingers and stared at her palm. She wanted to smash her lips against it, but at the same time, what if that used it up? Panicked, she curled her hand closed, as if that would preserve the kiss, and her brain began to fire off irrational hypotheticals.If Matías dies, will this kiss always be with me and I can still have him forever? Or is this the very last I will have of him? And if I use it up, then what will be left?
