Page 83 of One Year Ago in Spain
But if somethingreallybad had happened, Yolanda would have texted her, right? And Claire hadn’t gotten any messages from her.
She glanced at her phone. The battery was dead.
Oh no.
Claire jammed a charger cable into the phone. But it would take at least a few minutes before it had enough juice for her to check her texts, and meanwhile, all those emails and Slack messages were lying in wait…
She chugged the first bottle of wine, then opened and drank the other one, an equally bad cabernet so sharp it made her wince.
Claire took a deep breath and clicked on the Slack window.
Where are the notes from the call with Atwood IP counsel about the renegotiation of the 416 patent license?
What do the pale pink boxes on the corporate contract spreadsheet mean? Are they different from the medium pink and the dark pink? What about the different shades of yellow?
I can’t find the flowchart that tracks the assignments of all the different contracts from the Singapore subsidiary to the Italian subsidiary. And how did the Finnish parent holdingcorp relate to that? Was the German sister company also involved? Why would Einstein make corporate structures so complicated that even their own people don’t understand what is where and how it all connects???
There was message after message like that. When Claire was at the helm of a deal, everything ran smoothly because her militaristic organizational system meant she could find anything anyone needed immediately. Her color coding was so precise there were thirty-eight different colors and shades, denoting not only categories, but how things were linked, and the cross-references were kept in separate tabs full of all her shorthand footnotes.
The problem was, no one else could decode her meticulous system but her. She had made herself indispensable—partly out of type-A control freak tendencies, and partly so the law firm wouldalwaysneed her and would therefore have to promote her to partner eventually. But now when Claire couldn’t be there to run the merger, it was like someone had stuck wads of gum into the machinery and nothing was moving.
If she had been at home in New York, if life were still normal, she would have called Matías and he would have been at her door as soon as humanly possible, with ready hugs and almond cake from Épicerie Boulud.
But here, she was so, so alone. Claire buried her face in her hands.
“What am I going to do, Matías?”
“First, order room service,” he said. “My mom always says that a meal can’t solve everything, but itcanmake things a little easier.”
Claire’s hands flew away from her face.
He was sitting casually on her bed, as if he’d been there all along.
She gawked at him, then rubbed her eyes to make sure she was really seeing him.
But yes. Matías was here.
“How did you get in?”
He gave her a funny look and glanced at the door of her hotel room.
She, however, stared at her left palm. “Why are you here? I mean, why are you herenow?”
“Whoa.” Matías rose from the bed, shaking his head. “If you don’t want me here, I can go.”
Claire pressed her fingers into her temples. He was doing that thing again, evading questions if the answers didn’t make sense. She couldn’t push too hard or he might realize there was something off—that she hadn’t let him in, that he hadn’t been here just a minute before.
“No, I’m sorry, it’s fine,” she said. “I…work is blowing up and I’m having a rough time of it.”
The expression on his face softened. “What can I do?”
She sighed. “Just be here.”
He smiled and sat back down on the edge of the bed, only a couple of feet away. “I can do that. I’m here whenever you need me.”
Claire’s breath hitched.
Is that what it was? Matías appeared not simply when she touched where he’d left the kiss on her palm, but when sheneededhim?
