Page 9 of One Year Ago in Spain
She could almost see the thoughts churning behind his eyes, setting aside one proposal location for another yet to be determined. So be it. Maybe by then she will have figured out just what to do.
But one thing she did know. “Iamgoing to miss you a lot,” she said, looking up from where her head lay against his chest. She always felt safe here, nestled against Matías—a warm, temporary respite from whatever else may be going on around them.
He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “I think I have a solution for that.”
Matías carried her to the edge of the bed and set her down. But instead of making love to her, which was what she thought he intended, Matías took Claire’s left hand and spread it open. He brought it to his mouth and pressed a lingering kiss onto her palm. Then Matías curled her fingers closed around it.
“This kiss is for you to keep until I come home,” he said, “so you can carry me with you while I’m gone. If you find yourself missing me too much, just press your lips against your palm andimagine your kiss meeting mine, and I’ll be right here with you.”
“You are such an over-the-top romantic,” Claire said.
But even so, she looked down at her hand and kept her fist tightly closed, keeping the kiss he’d left her safe.
Claire
It turned outto be a good time for Matías to be gone. Over the next few days, Claire spent seventeen hours a day at her office. As the senior corporate associate in charge of an enormously high-profile merger, she was the quarterback of every minuscule detail and thousands of pages of documents. She had multiple teams working with her—intellectual property lawyers negotiating technology licensing agreements, environmental attorneys dealing with EPA issues at a couple of the target company’s sites, a real estate group investigating some expired leases, and more.
Just before 3p.m., a pair of first-year associates filed into her office to listen in on her upcoming conference call.
Being a senior associate meant that Claire had a semi-corner office, which was a room larger than the normal offices and next door to one of the powerful partners. Sometimes Claire sat at her mahogany desk and just stared at the wall between her and the partner’s office and daydreamed what it would be like when she, too, had a corner office of her own.
She just had to navigate this Intelligentsia Tech merger safely home.
“I like the painting behind your desk,” Julia, one of the first-year associates, said.
Claire smiled and swiveled to look at it. It was a large still life of a fortune cookie, broken open to reveal the white ribbon of paper inside, connecting the halves like a bridge. Sitting on the paper were miniature versions of Matías and Claire, having a picnic of Chinese takeout as if they were in a park rather than inside a cookie.
“Thank you,” Claire said. “It was a welcome home gift from my boyfriend a few months ago. I’d been traveling for work for ten days straight and finally flew back here on a red-eye. I was exhausted and all I wanted was a shower and to fall asleep in my own bed. But when I unlocked my apartment door at 6a.m.and stepped inside, there was coffee brewing, and Matías greeted me with fresh churros and a mug of melted dark chocolate to dip them in. But the pièce de résistance was the easel in the center of the kitchen table, covered by a sheet of fabric.
“When I unveiled it, it was this painting. I don’t know if you can read the fortune inside the cookie from where you’re sitting, but it says, ‘This is what happiness looks like.’ ”
Julia sighed. “That is the sweetest story I’ve ever heard.”
Claire allowed herself a moment to ponder what a fortune cookie would say now about her future with Matías.
But then it was back to business. She prepped the first-years for the call and let them know what their assignments would be afterward.
They opened their laptops as Claire dialed in on speakerphone. The general counsel of Intelligentsia Tech loathed video calls and would only do voice. Claire had to admit she was glad for at least one respite from the back-to-back Zoom meetings so she could sneak in a few bites of the salad she hadn’t finished earlier.
That was another thing she missed about Matías’s not being at home. Whenever he wasn’t working late in his studio or teaching at the academy, he would make the most delicious dinners, and the leftovers were Claire’s lunches. Without him around, though, she had to settle for cafeteria fare.
The conference call center connected her, and she introduced herself.
“This is Claire Walker, Windsor & Black.”
“Hi, Claire. No one else has joined yet.” Mitch Tahir didn’t bother to say his own name, because he assumed he was important enough that people would just know him. He was the general counsel of Intelligentsia Tech, an old-school lawyer in his late fifties who’d run the legal departments of some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. Mitch was brusque and legendarily hard to please. If he asked you to bring him a talking fish, he expected a talking fish. In his wake were hundreds of lawyers who had wilted under his demands.
But not Claire.
“Good to talk to you again, Mitch. We’re just a couple minutes early, so Yolanda and Kwame will be here shortly.”
As if on cue, the conference call center connected the employment attorneys.
“Yolanda Davis, Windsor & Black.”
“Kwame Jones, Windsor & Black.”
“All right,” Claire said. “Thanks, everyone, for being here. Let’s get started.”
