Page 63 of One Year Ago in Spain
“Hey, honey, how’reyou holding up?” Yolanda asked as soon as they were connected on video. Unlike Claire, Yolanda was put together—cream-colored silk blouse, matching gold necklace and earrings, and I’m-a-powerful-woman red lipstick. She sat in her spacious office with Central Park views; Yolanda had been promoted to partner in Windsor & Black’s employment law practice last year.
“I have only been worse one other time in my life,” Claire said, slumped on her bed in the hotel. The camera shot an unflattering angle from her lap straight up her face, so that it looked like she was all double-chin and earlobes. She did not care.
Yolanda shook her head. “I’m so sorry. Does that mean Matías isn’t getting better?”
“Possibly worse. Still unconscious, and he might have suffered a heart attack today. They don’t know yet, though. The CT scan wasn’t done early enough for the cardiology imaging team to read it, and after they do, the cardiologists themselves still have to weigh in. So we won’t know anything until late tomorrow morning, at the earliest.”
“Oh, Claire.”
“Yeah.”
They just sat on the video call without saying anything for a minute, doing what girlfriends did best—being there for one another, even if nothing could be fixed.
Finally, though, Claire broke the heavy silence. “Distract me. You said something was happening. I presume at our office? What’s going on?”
Yolanda toyed with her earring, which was a tell Claire was all too familiar with.
“That bad?” Claire asked.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Yolanda said. “It’s just that, there’s been some grumbling among the partners about your sudden departure two weeks before the Intelligentsia deal is about to close.”
“What?” Claire sat straight up in bed. “I’m in the middle of an emergency! Even then, I logged in and answered questions from the team as soon as I could after I landed here. I’ve tried to check in once a day, and I’ve only been gone a few days!”
“I know,” Yolanda said, sighing. “You are a human being, and everything you’re saying is logical and should be more than sufficient to excuse your absence. You shouldn’thaveto log in and do any work, either. But you know how Big Law is. The only acceptable excuse to be away from the office is if you’re on maternity leave, and even then, the assholes talk about you. I mean, remember what happened to Gemma Tanaka?”
“I still can’t believe they fucking put in her review that they questioned her ‘commitment to the firm’ just because she decided to start a family.”
“Me, neither, and yet I wasn’t surprised at all. She spoke openly to our mentor before she went on maternity leave, musing about how life would change with a baby. But she was naiveto think that women could be honest with the people who are supposed to be guiding their careers.”
“Well,” Claire said. “At least she came back from leave with a vengeance and showed them.”
“Yeah, but she had to work twice as hard to ‘earn back’ her reputation. Jason keeps asking when we can have a baby, but I’m terrified that there’s never a good time. A lot has gotten better for women in the workplace, but there is still so goddamn much to be done.”
“Hear, hear.”
“But enough about that,” Yolanda said. “This is about you. I’m worried because I’ve seen how hard it is to bounce back once the partners start muttering about you.”
Claire sagged into the pillows again. “What am I supposed to do, though? I can’t run the merger from here. I need to be with Matías. Fuck, Yolanda! Less than a week away from the office, and they’re already stabbing me in the back? Which partner is it? Not Bill. Tell me it’s not Bill.”
Bill Nguyen was the senior partner on the deal. He was a rainmaker for Windsor & Black; his client list included big hitters in the tech world like Intelligentsia. He had also been the one who recognized Claire’s talent for project management in her very first year out of law school. It was under Bill’s wing that she’d been given the opportunities to rise to such high esteem at the firm.
“Not Bill, but he’s not the only partner involved in the merger. Mitch Tahir is putting up a huge stink about your bailing on his deal, and it’s making the firm nervous that they’ll lose him as a client.”
“They didn’t defend me? They didn’t tell Mitch why I left?”
“It’s a personal matter. It’s up to you whether to disclose it to Intelligentsia.”
“Shit.” Claire pounded her fist on the bed. “I’ll email him right after we’re done.”
But it wasn’t only that. Claire—like all attorneys in the harshly competitive world of Big Law—knew that showing any sign of weakness would be interpreted as a character flaw. Like right now: Her career was in jeopardy because her boyfriend had dared to get in an accident. She was supposed to be able to handle both flawlessly, as a sign of someone good under pressure. It was inhumane.
Claire clenched her jaw as she thought of how she’d bent over backward for the firm. No, she’d done the equivalent of legal triple backflips—getting up in the middle of the night to lead calls with Intelligentsia subsidiaries based in India, waking up early to coordinate with the European law firms working on regulatory approvals, and sometimes not going home at all and dozing for just a couple of hours in a sleeping bag under her desk so she could be available for crucial, time-sensitive documents that had to be reviewed and turned around as soon as they hit her inbox.
“I didn’tbail,” Claire said.
“I know,” Yolanda said.
And that was the crux of it. Facts didn’t matter. Reasonability didn’t matter. In the cutthroat world of prestigious international law firms, the partners lived in terror that their high-paying clients would leave them. Hence, the beginnings of talk about Claire and her departure during the apex of the biggest corporate deal for the year for Windsor & Black.
