Page 66 of One Year Ago in Spain
She was drifting away, though. He had to find a way to bring her back.
I’ll propose,he thought as the hot water rinsed the shampoo from his hair.Why wait? I want to spend the rest of my life with her.
Immediately, he began to design the ring in his head—a sparkling sun made up of a round diamond in the center and tapered topazes around it like flames, because he would give Claire all the stars from the sky if he could, but at the very least, she could have the sun.
It would be perfect. They were planning to visit Spain next month. She would meet his family in person, and also his best friends. He would show her all the best places in Madrid, just like she’d introduced him to New York. And then, while on the Teleférico—the cable car that crosses the city with panoramic views from above—he would get down on one knee and ask Claire to marry him.
And hopefully, she would say sí.
Claire
Claire startled awakeat the sound of her phone ringing. She had fallen asleep on her keyboard—when was that, 4:30a.m.? Five?—and for a moment, she didn’t know where she was, because waking up from a late night of work in a hotel room was par for the course for her job, and she could have been in any city, working on any deal.
But the second ring of her phone jolted her back to Madrid, 9:30a.m.
Matías!
She lunged for her cell, barely glancing at the screen before answering. “Aracely?”
“It was not a heart attack.”
“Oh, thank god.” All the air in Claire’s lungs rushed out in a relieved gush. “So his heart is okay?”
“The CT scan looks fine, and they just did another EKG and that is also fine. They are going to continue to monitor him. Something caused stress on Matías’s heart. They don’t know what it was, but his heart is stable for now.”
It was me,Claire thought.I caused stress on his heart by kissing him.
But maybe it was just like the other times when she was with Matías’s soul, which raised the heart activity in the real Matías.It was just that the touching—the kissing—wastoomuch stimulation, and it had crossed the line from good elevation to something that worried the doctors.
So she couldn’t touch him again.
Yet there was something else to consider, too. Matías’s soul was getting progressively more solid every time Claire met him.
It must be working. She was connecting with him, and it was strengthening his attachment to this world.
But now that she knew the physical part of Matías was stable at the hospital, Claire would need to find his soul and apologize for running out of the studio yesterday. She also needed to come up with an excuse for why they couldn’t touch.
“Claire, are you coming to the hospital?” Aracely asked. “My mother is asking about you.”
“I’m sorry, I just woke up,” Claire said. “There’s something I need to take care of this morning, but I promise I will be there later.”
—
Claire went backto the same café from yesterday, where Matías had appeared. She also sat at the same table on the patio. Sameness hadn’t worked at the drink kiosk, but Claire was running on fumes, and it was the best she could come up with.
A waitress came over, and Claire—who knew she had to practice speaking Spanish if she wanted to get better at it—took a deep breath and said slowly, “Buenos días. Un café con leche, por favor.”
“Vale,” the waitress said. “¿Y algo para comer?”
Claire replayed the question in her head, parsing out thewords. She got three out of four, and thankfully, they were the critical ones.
Y= and.Para= for.Comer= eat.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t literate enough yet to read the menu, and she didn’t want to order churros con chocolate because, try as she might, Vega’s description of Matías feeding them to her was too vivid for Claire to fend off before she’d had coffee. However, she had learned another trick from her language app—a lot of English words ending in -tion sounded almost the same in Spanish, except they ended in -ción.
“¿Una recomendación?” Claire asked the waitress. “Una sorpresa, por favor.”A recommendation? A surprise, please.
The waitress smiled. “Okay,” she said, which needed no translation.
