Chapter 25 Claire
Claire
“Thank you for coming out here,” Claire said. “I didn’t expect to end up in Malasa?a when I chased after Vega.”
“It is no problem,” Armando said. “It was not my turn to sit in Matías’s room anyway, and I understand why you would want to visit his studio, especially if you are already in the neighborhood.”
Together, they walked up to the sleek white building that housed a number of artist workspaces. It was only one story, but tall and long, and when they stepped through the gated entry, Claire was surprised to find a sunny garden full of orchids and ferns. All the studios had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the plants; if Claire had to guess, the windows were all north facing, to let in the best light. It was something Matías had missed in his studio in New York, where—without the right sort of windows—he’d had to rig his own artificial lighting with photography lights and reflectors.
“Matías’s studio is at the end,” Armando said, pointing in the direction of a cluster of yellow orchids. The shades on his windows were drawn, though, so Claire couldn’t see inside.
Armando scanned a key fob and let them into the building, then down the corridor. The doors were all white, too, with nameplates or signs on them to indicate who worked there.
“Is it only painters here, or other kinds of artists?” Claire asked.
“Only painters,” Armando said. “The landlady says potters and sculptors are either too messy when they work with clay or too loud when they work with stone. Do not worry. You will not see Vega here.”
Claire bit her lip, thankful that he’d understood her insecurity without her having to express it out loud. Then she realized she’d been silly to even worry about Vega. If her studio was here, too, she wouldn’t have seemed sad about not having access to the building.
When they reached Matías’s studio, though, Claire’s thoughts of Vega faded. Because the sign on the studio was his familiar signature, Matías de León, in elegant, looping penmanship with the accent marks somehow expressing exuberance in the way he dashed them upward, longer than necessary, like fireworks shooting up into the sky just moments before bursting. Seeing his autograph made Claire smile and want to cry at the same time.
Armando unlocked the door and held it open for Claire. She stepped in, expecting to see tubes of paint everywhere, half-finished work on easels, used rags and still life models all over the floor, and the general chaos that surrounded Matías’s process. But instead of chaos and the usually ubiquitous stink of solvent in the air, it was mostly empty.
Some old drawings were taped to the walls, with blank panels of wood stacked beneath them, but there were no partially used tubes of oil paint scattered anywhere. It still smelled like solvent and linseed oil, but the scent was faint. Eleven months old.
Claire stared open-mouthed at the pristine space.
“It’s strangely…tidy.”
“He took much of his work with him to the United States,” Armando said.
“I guess so.” Claire walked slowly through the studio. There were two glass-topped taborets—worktables—one close to the door, and one deeper inside, both with old coffee canisters filled with various paintbrushes. Four wooden easels—all sturdy but of varying sizes, because most of Matías’s pieces were “normal” dimensions, but he also liked having a huge, long-running project going on at the same time as whatever else he was working on. Shelves with jars of gesso, PVC, foam brushes, and other lesser-used supplies.
“Do you mind if I open the shades?” Claire asked.
“As long as we close them before we leave, go ahead,” Armando said.
She walked over to the wall of glass and pulled down each of the blinds—they would seem upside down to most people, but that’s because realist painters often liked to block the sun from the bottom part of the window so light streamed from the top, down onto their models at an attractive angle.
There was a gray couch along the windows; Matías liked to brainstorm lying down, which sometimes meant he accidentally fell asleep, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because his ideas often clarified themselves in his dreams. As Claire passed the sofa, she ran her finger along an armrest, speckled here and there with paint. She wondered which piece each color had come from—red from the thimble-sized alien in the painting of a woman and her book? Orange from the monk offering the world in his hands? Yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and white from other paintings Claire had been lucky enough to see? Or did they belong to work that had come and gone long before he’d met her?
With sunlight streaming into the studio, the space felt even more like Matías now. She looked through a stack of wooden panels against a nearby wall; they were all prepped with rabbit skin glue and gesso, but they were still blank. Like Armando said, Matías had shipped most of his work with him for gallery shows in New York.
But then Claire noticed what looked like one of Matías’s enormous panels in the back of the studio, propped against the wall. A bedsheet was draped over the painting. She strode over.
Armando turned just as she reached it.
“Claire, do not—”
Too late. She was already lifting the sheet.
Oh.
It was a self-portrait of Matías and Vega, done in Matías’s signature realism, although this one had more than a touch of the surreal. In the painting, he and Vega faced each other in this very studio, but both their figures were unfinished; if this were a photograph, it would be a shot of two artists in the middle of creating their work. Matías held a brush in his hand, painting Vega in front of him, as if inventing her in real time. Her body was fully rendered—with all those sensual curves that Claire couldn’t help imagining his brush caressing—but Vega’s face was still a work in progress, much of it purposefully left as a hazy ébauche, an outline where you could only see a blurry shape of what was to come, including the brown transfer lines from the original drawing. Matías’s brush was in the process of painting her lips.
At the same time, Vega was sculpting him, creating Matías out of clay. His head and arms and torso were complete, but her bare hands stroked the part that would become his pelvis.
A wave of nausea roiled through Claire’s stomach. She dropped the sheet over the painting and staggered back.
“It is truly in the past,” Armando said quietly. “That is why Matías left that painting here.”
“Right. Of course,” Claire said.
But how could you leave something that passionate behind for good? Matías and Vega had been together for more than fifteen years. They were both artists, kindred spirits, and he had dreamed of being with her for the rest of his life.
Maybe Claire had just been a rebound. She had been in the right place, at the right time, when he came to New York. The fact that she was Vega’s opposite in personality—a lawyer who lived by her calendar, who didn’t understand a thing about art—might have been exactly what he thought he needed.
Then they’d just gotten stuck in the progression of a relationship, with one thing leading to the next, until faced with the fork in the road where you had to decide whether to break up or stay together. And Matías, who was a hopeless romantic, had chosen the path of proposing less than a year after meeting Claire. The road where he could be married and have that fantasy “happily ever after” where he had once slotted Vega.
Claire cleared her throat and tried to look stable, even though she still felt like she was going to throw up. She used a tactic that was reliably helpful as an attorney when faced with difficult situations—she pivoted and changed the topic.
“Armando, do you ever paint here?”
He watched her for a moment, assessing whether she really was okay after seeing such an intimate rendering of Vega with Matías. But if Claire was good at anything, she was good at putting up a shield of unflappability and strength when others would panic; it’s why her clients trusted her to run their make-or-break deals.
She pulled off another convincing job, because Armando answered her question. “Matías told me to consider the studio mine while he was gone, but I still work on my watercolors at home.”
“Why? This is such a great space.”
“Yes, but…how can I explain?” Armando smiled. “Okay. Imagine you have a little boy. He has a corner of his bedroom where he plays with all his stuffed animals and toy cars. He is a generous child, so he says to you, ‘Mommy, when I go to school, you can play in my corner.’
“Do you do it? Probably not. Because in your mind, that corner belongs to your son. As a parent, that space is sacred to you because it is his.
“In the same way, I can never consider this place as mine. This is Matías’s studio. I do not want to change anything about it, even if it is only using a corner of the room.”
“ Vale, ” Claire said softly. It was a word she’d heard the de Leóns use when they agreed with each other, which was quite often. What Armando said made sense, even in the context of his son’s just going overseas for a couple of years. But now that Matías was in a coma, it seemed even more important to preserve everything that Matías had ever touched, every room he had ever graced.
“I am going back to the hospital.” Armando gave her the key to the studio. “You will come back soon?”
“Of course,” Claire said. “I just want to be here for a little while, if that’s okay?”
Armando nodded. “I understand. The studio is like being with Matías, but in a different way.”
—
Claire watched through the window as Armando left. When he had turned the corner, she hurried outside to a café across the street and parked herself at a table on the front patio. She hoped that Matías would come to the studio because he’d said he needed to pack up his paintings to ship overseas. But she couldn’t already be in his studio when he appeared. That would set off all sorts of alarm bells in his head. She already had a strike against her, given how desperate she’d acted last night after the Sorolla Museum closed.
New tactic: Play it cool.
I just happened to be at a table at a café that has an unobstructed line of sight to the front door of your studio building. No, that’s not weird at all. Total coincidence.
Claire would’ve made a terrible spy.
But what else could she do? She didn’t have any better ideas for intercepting Matías. Yesterday, her careful strategy of being at the park’s drink kiosk at the same time as she’d previously seen him was a bust, but then he’d suddenly appeared later, outside a lingerie store she’d never stepped foot in before. He wasn’t predictable. So being here, close to the one place he’d said he would be, seemed like the best option.
That was, assuming souls actually followed their own plans.
Given that this was Matías, who—in corporeal form—had a hard time sticking to his calendar, the chances were not great.
And yet, Claire stayed.
She stayed through three cups of coffee.
She stayed through an order of toast with pomegranate jam, then an order of huevos rotos.
She stayed as her sunscreen wore off, and her skin began to scorch.
No Matías.
Was he not coming at all? Could she have missed him and he was already upstairs in his studio?
Or was Matías with Vega?
All that coffee Claire had drunk threatened to come back up her throat.
Don’t think about Vega!
Claire took the key to the studio from her pocket and passed it back and forth between her fingers for a few minutes.
Then she got annoyed at herself for being impatient.
When the proposal hadn’t happened as Matías hoped, he’d declared in his diary, “I will be patient. Because I think we are worth waiting for.”
He was more than right. So Claire would stay here at the café, waiting for him, for as long as it took.
But god, she missed him. It was a constant, burning weight in the center of her chest. Not sharp like heartburn; more like she had a piece of charcoal embedded inside her, and the embers never went out.
She closed her fist around the key, crushing it to her palm.
Matías appeared at the café entrance. He walked right past Claire and inside, as if he was going to order something.
What? How?
Claire gawked after him for a second. Then her eyes went down to her fist. She uncurled her fingers, where the key to the studio lay directly on top of where Matías had kissed her before he left New York.
I’ll be right here with you, he’d said.
“Oh,” Claire whispered.
The first time, when he’d shown up at her hotel, she had just pressed her lips against her palm.
The second time, at the drink kiosk, she had had a bunch of coins cupped in her hand. But he hadn’t come to the park yesterday because she’d already known which euro was which by then, so she hadn’t poured them all out. Claire had just plucked them straight out of her wallet with her fingertips.
The third time, she’d been clutching a handful of underwear.
And now, the key…
But it couldn’t be as simple as anything touching her palm. Claire carried things all the time. If that’s all it took, Matías would be with her almost nonstop.
So what was the other common thread?
Claire had to drop the thought, though, because Matías reemerged from the café.
She wanted to jump up and run over to him, but she’d already done that yesterday, and Claire didn’t want him to feel like he was a rabbit who’d just sprung a trap—even though, truth be told, she had been lying in wait for him here.
Act nonchalant, she reminded herself. She picked up her phone from the table and put it to her ear, pretending to be on a call, while angling herself so he would see her.
He was about to pass her. And he was quietly talking to himself, which he did when he was lost deep inside his own thoughts, often working out an idea for a new painting.
Matías was going to walk right by her and not even notice.
Claire silently apologized to the waiter for what she was about to do.
She knocked her empty coffee mug onto the cement. The cup shattered, sending ceramic shards in all directions. “Oh my god!” Claire leaped up from her seat. “I’m so sorry,” she said to the waiter who was hurrying over. And the whole time, Claire made a point of being in a position where Matías could see her face, but she didn’t make eye contact with him; it was important that he notice her first this time, if this setup was going to have any chance of being credible as a coincidence.
“Please,” Claire said to the waiter. “Let me pay for that mug.” She did her best to play the role of loud American tourist, making a fuss as she got her wallet out of her purse, all the while using big arm gestures that Matías surely couldn’t miss. She might as well be trying to help a plane land.
“Claire?” Matías said. “Is it you again?”
She faked being too flustered to recognize him for a moment, even though it was difficult not to stare, because when he stepped out of the shade of the building and back into the sunlight, it was obvious that he wasn’t transparent anymore, but translucent. His body didn’t go gauzy in the sun, but maintained all its color, just in a washed-out way that blurred at the edges.
Why the change? Was being with her slowly making him more solid as she strengthened his soul’s connection to her?
But Claire had to keep up her act, so she squinted and said, “Oh gosh, Matías. I’m so embarrassed for you to see me like this. I’m not usually clumsy. It’s just that this phone call—” She waved her cell in the air before realizing it was the home screen, with no active call.
Shoot.
Claire pasted a puzzled frown on her face. “I think my client hung up on me.”
“For breaking a coffee cup? Tough standards.”
Matías smiled, and Claire’s breath stuttered.
After waiting for him for hours, now she just stood there, stunned by his easy charm, which was both familiar and new all over again.
“What are you doing in Malasa?a?” he asked.
She exhaled. Claire had a prepared answer for that. “I figured that if I’m working in Madrid, I should try to see more of it than just my hotel and my client’s office. All the recommendations online say this is a great neighborhood to check out, so…here I am. Working, but it’s a victory because I’m outside of a conference room.”
“Did you try the café’s almendrados?”
“No,” Claire said. “What are they?”
“Here, try one,” Matías said, making the motions of opening what might be a paper bag, but just like his cellphone the other day, she couldn’t see it. He held the invisible cookie out to Claire. “They’re made from almonds.”
“You really like sweet almond things, huh?”
“Actually, yeah. How’d you know that?”
Claire blanched. She shouldn’t know that, at least as far as this Matías was concerned. On their first real date in New York, he’d brought those little glass jars of bienmesabe canario, his old family recipe. But that hadn’t happened yet, not in his timeline.
“Just a guess,” Claire said with a squeak. “I love almond sweets, too, but I’m going to pass for now, thanks. I’m really full from breakfast.”
“Your loss, but more for me.” Matías grinned as his fingers worked to close the bag of cookies that Claire couldn’t see.
They had reached a critical juncture in the “chance” meeting. He could walk away. She could prevent it from happening by inviting herself to his studio. But that might give off the hunter-tracking-prey vibe again, as well as making her look pathetic. And Claire was sure that being pathetic wasn’t the reason Matías had originally fallen in love with her, so it certainly wasn’t going to work as the hook this time, either.
She decided to try reverse psychology.
“Well, it was great seeing you again, Matías.”
“Oh. Uh, yes. Great seeing you, too.” He hovered for a moment, then turned to walk away.
Patience, she thought.
She knew Matías. The same part of his brain that loved finding new hobbies also liked being a contrarian. If someone said, You can never learn tennis well as an adult, Matías would buy a tennis racket and rent court time to prove them wrong. If accepted opinion said coffee and cheese don’t go well together, he would spend an entire weekend in the kitchen until he made a recipe where they did.
Not that Claire was just a hobby, but she understood his mind well enough to predict that if she gave him the brush-off, he ought to at least pause.
The question was, was she enough of a draw for him to come back?
He took one step. Two, three.
On his fourth, he turned 180 degrees.
“Claire?”
“Hmm?” She looked up from something that was supposedly important on her phone.
“Yesterday, at Museo Sorolla, the way you looked at the paintings and talked about them—How do you understand art so well? Did you grow up with it, or study it in university?”
“No,” Claire said. “I didn’t used to get art at all. But then a…friend taught me how to appreciate it. How to see beyond the surface. Now, one of my favorite things is discovering new painters I didn’t know before.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Matías hesitated for just a split second. Then he asked, “Would you be interested in coming to my studio to see my work?”
“Oh no, I couldn’t intrude. You’re busy; I don’t want to get in your way.”
“You wouldn’t! I have to pack up my paintings anyway, so if you want to look at them while I’m doing that, it’s not really any extra time.”
“Are you sure?” Claire asked, already standing up and putting her phone into her purse.
“Absolutely. In fact, my studio is just across the street.”
“No way,” Claire said. “What an amazing coincidence.”
—
Matías unlocked the door—or he thought he did—and just walked through.
But the real—solid—door was still closed in front of Claire.
“Welcome to my studio,” she heard him say from inside.
Shit! She fumbled for the key in her pocket.
Claire unlocked the door and slipped in while Matías was saying, “I’m sorry it’s a mess in here. I’m not the neatest person, and it’s worse now because I’m about to move across the ocean.” Claire had just propped the heavy metal door open—so she wouldn’t have the same problem upon leaving—when he turned to look at her.
“Well, what do you think?”
Her eyes widened. The studio she saw was nearly empty, since Matías had packed everything a year ago. But what he saw was probably something akin to what Claire had expected to see when she came here with Armando—tubes of paint and palette knives and brushes scattered across the taborets, rulers stained with paint, and rags and tarps and discarded drawings and color studies all over the floor.
She hadn’t thought through the gap in their timelines when she’d accepted his invitation to come see his work.
“That bad?” Matías asked.
“No, it’s just…” Claire riffled through her brain for how to respond. Luckily, being a lawyer, she had some practice in vague, noncommittal answers. “I’m hyperorganized to a fault. I like being reminded that there are other personality types out there.”
“That was a very nice way to say ‘You’re a slob, Matías.’?”
“No, it’s not what I—”
He laughed, and it lit up his entire face like he was emanating pure sunshine. Claire swore the temperature in the studio rose by a few degrees.
Of course, being in proximity to Matías also had that effect on her in general.
“Anyway,” he said, “you’re here to look at paintings.” He dropped his invisible bag of cookies on the end of the closest taboret, then gestured at an empty space in the middle of the room. “This is the one I’ve been working on since I received the invitation to go to New York. It’s nearly finished. Just a few more small touches.”
Based on the height of where he was pointing, Claire assumed he was looking at a painting on an easel, although there was no easel there at present that she could see.
But what was the painting of?
“It’s breathtaking,” she said, hedging. “What else are you thinking of adding?”
“I think there needs to be a bit more light reflected off the girl as she looks into the puddle. The cliché approach would be to put the sparkle in her eyes as she’s looking at herself as a bumblebee. But I want to highlight the wonder in her face . Like in that Sorolla portrait from last night, with the woman in black in the drab room.”
Claire teared up as she looked at the space where Matías’s New York skyline and sunflower painting was supposed to be. It had been the first work of his she’d ever seen, in the window of the Rose Gallery. I want that, she had thought. That kind of surprising joy in the midst of normal life.
Matías turned to her. “Claire, are you all right? You’re crying.”
She tried to smile, while swiping the tears away. “It’s stunning, Matías. Truly. A surreal delight.”
He knit his brows together for a second. “Did you just say ‘a surreal delight’? That’s what I was going to name my exhibition.”
“Unbelievable.” Claire smiled fully now.
“Yeah. Wow.” Matías shook his head. “Anyway, I want to show you more. Come this way.” He darted left of the worktable, expecting her to follow. But moving around a studio where she couldn’t see anything was easier said than done. How would Claire know if she was running straight into a chair or another easel that wasn’t in the same place as the ones she could see? Or if he’d left mahl sticks or big metal safety cans of used solvent in the middle of the floor?
But did it really matter? She would walk right through the things that weren’t really there now. It would be fine as long as Matías didn’t see her do it.
Still, she tried to keep on his heels without getting weirdly close.
Matías stopped in front of the eastern wall. Claire came up beside him.
“I want to take these with me,” he said.
“Mm,” Claire said, because she had no idea what they were looking at.
“But my sister, Aracely, says I shouldn’t because they will only make me homesick.”
Ah. Claire suspected this was his “Homage to Spain” series. Part of the exhibit at the Rose Gallery had been dedicated to it: the chef sprinkling tiny hearts onto paella. A flamenco dancer on a beach who, instead of castanets, performed with clacking seashells. A matador extending a bouquet of flowers rather than a sword at a black bull.
“I think,” Claire said, “that your home country will always be with you, whether you have the paintings or not. Living in the States will never change that.”
He crossed his arms as he contemplated both the work and what Claire had said. Since she couldn’t really see the paintings—other than in her memory—she watched him . And what she saw, she’d never noticed before. There was a sadness in Matías’s eyes, like part of him was reluctant to leave this place. By the time Claire had met him in New York, he’d been there a week already and had thrown himself with the usual Matías enthusiasm into experiencing everything there was to offer there. Any hint of regret never showed.
But right here, this Matías hadn’t left yet, and that meant the future was a vast maw of the unknowable. At the same time, his heart was still raw from Vega’s breaking off their engagement and telling him to go ahead and move to the other side of the planet without her.
“You should definitely bring these paintings with you,” Claire said. She knew he would anyway, because she’d seen them at the Rose Gallery. But it also seemed like the right thing to say as he stood on the cusp of a monumental change in his life. For Matías, art had always been both wild exploration and security blanket. She knew what having a piece of home with him would mean.
He nodded slowly. “Thank you. I think I will pack these.”
Matías showed her around the rest of the studio, identifying the other pieces he had selected for his first exhibit in New York. Talking about art animated him, and Claire relished seeing Matías so vibrant, his eyes like fire, the tanned muscles of his arms flexing as he pointed out this and that in his paintings.
He was so different from his pale, drugged and battered counterpart at the hospital who was growing thinner and weaker by the day.
Lost in thought, she didn’t notice when Matías veered to the right to avoid something she couldn’t see.
“Claire, no!”
Matías lunged toward her, knocking her away from whatever it was he saw there. Momentum threw them against the wall, but her head didn’t hit, because Matías instinctively cradled his arm around her and took the impact.
He held her pinned like that for a long moment, chest to chest, her face tucked into the crook of his neck. She could feel his quickened breath across her hair, his heart pounding against her body.
Claire gasped.
She wasn’t supposed to be able to feel him.
Matías was not exactly solid, but he wasn’t not there, either. His touch was the impression of him, like when Claire had closed her eyes and pressed her lips to her palm and it had felt like Matías was truly there. She’d been able to imagine the pressure of his mouth so viscerally—the velvet of his lips and the strong lines of his jaw—that it had felt almost real.
Just like right now. He was holding her, her back against the wall, and she could feel the phantom weight of his body against hers. He was warmer than the air in the rest of the studio, and that heat made Claire flush with the memory of other times when they had held their bodies so close.
In the humid greenhouse of the New York Botanical Garden. Pressed against a stone arch at the Met Cloisters. Behind a cotton candy stand on Coney Island.
But in the privacy of a studio, they could do even more. She wanted to kiss Matías’s neck, run her hands down his back, slide them down and unbuckle his belt, and do the things she knew would make him have to brace himself on her shoulders.
“Claire,” he whispered.
“Yes?”
He tilted her chin up with a finger. She met his molten gaze.
And then his lips met hers, his kiss a summer storm. If she closed her eyes, Claire could feel him, like wind and sun grazing her mouth. She recalled the taste of his tongue from their first kiss—almonds and brown sugar—and as she kissed this version of Matías who was not yet hers, she also missed the one who was, and tears streamed down her face, mixing salt with the memory of sweetness.
But then she remembered where he really was—in a coma, surrounded by never-ending beeping, an empty chair by his bed, waiting for her.
Suddenly, he pulled back, breathing hard, and brought his hand to his forehead.
“Matías! Are you okay?”
“I’m just…light-headed.”
The blood drained from Claire’s face. What if Matías had noticed that he was touching her, but couldn’t quite feel her? If his soul realized something was off, it might sever his connection to this world.
“I think I’m going to lie down for a moment.”
Claire moved to help him, then jumped away. She shouldn’t touch him anymore. Professor Hong had been wrong about the ability to feel him, and now it was obviously having some kind of bad effect…
As Matías staggered to the couch and lowered himself onto it, Claire’s phone rang.
The caller ID said Aracely .
No no no… Had something happened at the hospital because Claire touched Matías’s soul?
The timing was too on point for it to be mere chance. But she couldn’t answer the phone here, not in front of this Matías, not when it could be about Comatose Matías’s condition. Claire couldn’t let this Matías know about the accident.
What was she supposed to do? If Matías was in danger at the hospital, she had to get to him. And yet, his soul needed her, too. If Claire abandoned him in this state, what would happen?
On the couch, Matías moaned.
“Can I help?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice sounding thin. “It just hit me all of a sudden.”
She came closer and noticed tiny beads of sweat at his temples. Oh…could it be…?
“Matías, any chance you have issues with your blood sugar? Maybe you’re a little hypoglycemic?”
Of course, Claire knew the answer was yes. Often, when Matías got too caught up in his work and forgot to eat, a wave of weakness would suddenly wallop him. He’d feel light-headed and clammy and start sweating.
“Uh, yes, actually, I do,” Matías said, slowly sitting up. “Do you think you could grab the almendrados?”
Claire hurried to the worktable near the door and swept both her arms together in the area he had set the invisible bag of cookies earlier. She held her breath in hope that she’d actually picked it up with her awkward swoop.
As she returned to the couch, Matías reached out and seemed to take something from the crook of her right arm. “Thank you.”
She exhaled in relief as he opened the invisible bag and popped an invisible almendrado into his mouth.
Her phone rang again.
Aracely.
Shit…
Claire’s heartbeat pounded in her ears.
“Do you need to take that call?” Matías asked.
She shook her head.
“Are you sure? Because you don’t have to babysit me. I’m already starting to feel better.”
“I’ll stay until you finish all the cookies,” Claire said. At home, a hit of sugar usually solved his hypoglycemic episodes pretty quickly. He’d have to eat something more substantial afterward, but at least he wouldn’t feel ill anymore.
Matías made a big show of eating the rest of the almendrados and then tipping the crumbs from the bag into his mouth. At least, that’s what Claire thought he was doing. She couldn’t actually see.
Her phone chimed with several text notifications, and then it rang again.
On the couch, Matías looked nearly solid now.
“Claire, take the call.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. See?” He rose from the sofa and remained steady on his feet.
Her phone was still ringing.
“Okay. Then sorry. I have to go!” Claire ran toward the open door, taking a route along the perimeter of the studio to make sure she wouldn’t plow through anything invisible.
But by the time she hurtled out of the building, Aracely had hung up.
Claire punched at her phone to call her back as she sprinted toward the subway.
She had to get to the hospital.
She had to know if, by recklessly touching Matías’s soul, she’d stepped over an uncrossable line.