Chapter 37 Claire
Claire
Claire had nowhere to go but the hotel. She stumbled into her room a tear-soaked, snotty mess and collapsed on her bed, which was still pristinely made from the previous day because she’d spent the night wandering through Madrid instead.
Her computer dinged from the desk.
Every muscle in her body clenched. The last time Claire had been on her computer, it had been because Yolanda warned her that some of the partners were doubting Claire’s abilities. So she had spent all of that night putting out fires on the merger, trying to deputize the other members of the team to take over her parts.
But that was over thirty hours ago.
Still. Fuck it.
There were more important things going on right now.
And yet…Claire could do nothing about the other things. Work, though…That was something she could still control. It was a world where people listened to what she had to say. Her whole life might be cratering, but that part was crumbling slower and she might still be able to fix it.
Claire peeled herself off the mattress, stopping at the minibar for two little bottles of cheap wine before she sank into the chair at the desk. She woke her computer screen as she cracked open the screw-top on the chardonnay.
There were over two hundred new, unread emails. And god only knew how many Slack messages.
But if something really bad 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 holding corp 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 would always need 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 it can make 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 here now ?”
“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 she needed him?
The first time she’d kissed her hand in the hotel lobby, she’d actually said aloud, “I need you, Matías.”
The second time he’d shown up, she was in a mild panic trying to get a simple Coke from the park vendor.
The third time, Claire had been buying underwear but freaking out that how many pairs she bought would somehow signify her faith in Matías’s recovery and might jinx him.
As for last night, she’d just left the hospital after being lectured that she wasn’t doing enough for him, and she had been clutching her purse, upset because she was spending her days doing everything she could to connect with his soul, to try to bring him closer so he could reunite with his body and hopefully wake up.
In each of those instances, Claire had shed some of the armor she usually wore. And in that vulnerability, when she pressed on her palm, Matías came.
Because he knew she needed him.
Her eyes welled up as she looked at him sitting on her bed. “How do I deserve you?”
Matías shook his head. “You don’t have to earn anyone, Claire. Just be you.”
“I doubt that’s enough.”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
Her stomach growled.
A grin crept onto Matías’s face. “Now how about we order you some food?”
—
Claire couldn’t eat much because of the anxiety over what was in her inbox, but after some bread and gazpacho, she at least didn’t feel like she was going to pass out.
“I’m afraid to look,” she said, turned away from her computer.
“Do you want me to read for you?” Matías asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But no. I should do it.”
She took a few more sips of Coke. Then, with no more excuses to procrastinate, she pivoted slowly to the computer and clicked on her inbox.
Claire skimmed the names of the senders. There were so many emails she would have to prioritize whose to read first. She skipped over the name of junior associates, and went right to the ones from Bill Ngyuen, her mentor and the senior partner in charge of the merger, to Mitch Tahir, Intelligentsia Tech’s general counsel.
Reading the emails in chronological order, she saw they began as the usual firing squad type of questions Mitch asked daily to keep up to speed on the ten thousand moving parts of the merger.
But as Claire got to emails from the more recent hours—the end of the business day in the United States yesterday—she stopped seeing messages with Bill’s name as the sender.
Instead, Mitch would copy her on things, with Bill’s prior emails below. Emails Bill had cut her out of.
Until finally, a message from Mitch to Bill:
Is Claire no longer on this deal? Should I stop including her on emails, too?
“No…” Claire stared slack-jawed at the screen.
“What’s happening?” Matías asked.
She didn’t answer. Her hand shook as she started panic-scrolling through the next emails. Mitch had forwarded one to her with the message “I’m sorry, Claire,” and below was an email from Bill:
From: [email protected]
RE: Claire Walker
Mitch,
My sincerest apologies. Claire’s work ethic is not up to Windsor she thought she would have merited more respect from him. Not only that, but he hadn’t even reached out to her first to let her know he was about to replace her.
“Fuck!” Claire slammed her laptop closed.
Matías jumped up from the bed and stepped toward her, arms outstretched to comfort her.
“Don’t touch me!” she yelled.
He raised both hands in the air and backed away. “I didn’t mean—”
“Sorry,” Claire said, clenching her fists and beating on either side of her head. “It’s not you. I just…”
“It’s okay.” Matías lowered himself to the carpet so he was sitting at her feet. “You’re in shock. But I’m here for you.”
She sagged in the chair. “I just got kicked off the deal I was leading. I’ve been working on it for the last eight months. It was supposed to be the feather in my cap, the one that would make me partner.”
Matías frowned. “But aren’t you here in Madrid for work? Why would they kick you off the deal?”
“I’m here for…a different client,” Claire said.
“Well, then, that’s not fair. If you have to work on something else, how can they blame you for not also working on the first deal?”
Claire laughed humorlessly. “Law firms are not exactly humane places to work, especially the top international ones like Windsor I give myself entirely to the work. That’s how I love—my family, my friends, my…Well, anyway, my point is, I think I understand that about you.
“But I suspect it means you also give every single second of your life to your firm, if they ask it of you. You are the best kind of soldier, the kind who never shows weakness, who always says she can fight on no matter how depleted her resources or how impossible the situation. And yet, Claire…you’re human. You have limits. If your law firm really did respect you, they would understand that.”
Claire shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Plus, I don’t really have a choice. I love being in charge of high-profile mergers and acquisitions. I’m really good at it, too. Besides, it’ll get better once I’m promoted from associate to partner.”
“Will it?” Matías held her gaze, his golden eyes unwavering.
She looked away and at her phone instead. It had enough battery power now that Claire could check her texts, and sure enough, there had been several from Yolanda. The last one said, “I’m so sorry. There was nothing I could do.”
Maybe Matías was right. It didn’t get that much better once you made partner. You climbed to the top of the associate ladder just to be hoisted up to the bottom rung of the partner one. Sure, Yolanda made more money now, but she was still too scared to start a family because all the major clients were “owned” by the senior partners, and the juniors were basically just there to work for them. Not much different from being an associate, except with better pay.
“I like the substance of what I do too much to quit, though,” Claire said. “I’ll just…have to prove myself again when I get back to New York.”
“Hmm,” Matías said.
Claire raised a brow. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
Matías sighed. “I think you’re probably better than that, Claire.”
“Better than what?”
“Than letting other people walk all over you, then thanking them and going back for more.”
“Wow. That…makes me sound pathetic.”
“You’re not—”
“No, thank you for that clarity. Do you have more hard truths to tell me? Because I seem to like that. You know, being cut down and then begging for more.”
“Claire…”
“You know, Matías, not everyone can be born an artistic phenom. Some of us have to work for what we want.”
“Excuse me? I work, Claire. Maybe most people don’t understand it, because they think art is something any AI or child can do since everyone used to paint in grade school, too. But it’s not . I have studied for years to master my technique and define my style. It takes me over five hundred hours to complete a single, standard-sized painting, and that doesn’t count the months I wait for the paint to fully dry before I varnish the piece, or the time I spend custom-building the frames for each painting. When I’m in my studio and I forget to eat, it’s not because I’m an empty-headed, flighty artist. It’s because I am consumed by my work, because I care so damn much about making it right.
“You, on the other hand, confuse the love of what you do with the love of where you work. You think you’re brave, Claire, for being able to take the shit your partners—your supposed future colleagues —heap on you. But there’s a different kind of brave, too, and that’s the ability to face the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable.”
Claire scoffed. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from you. You’re not even real.”
He stared at her, brows furrowed. “I beg your pardon?”
Fuck. She hadn’t meant to let that slip, to make a reference to his soul’s inability to deal with what was really happening. But in the heat of the argument, it had slipped out. “Forget it.”
Matías’s hands tugged at his hair again, and Claire worried if she’d gone too far.
But this Matías didn’t get light-headed like he had when she’d kissed him in the studio. Instead, he threw his arms up in the air.
“No, I don’t want to forget about it,” he said. “I was starting to fall for you, but maybe it’s better that we say what we have to say now. Then we won’t have to waste time together when we’re in New York.”
The blood drained from Claire’s face. “Matías…”
“Actually, I think I have already heard enough,” he said, getting up from the carpet. “It was nice meeting you, Claire. I’ll see myself out.”
“Matías, wait!”
He walked to the door without looking back and vanished through it.
“No, come back!” Claire rubbed on the spot on her palm. “I need you, Matías! And you need me, too. You just don’t know it, please…”
The hotel phone rang.
“Matías?” she answered, full of nonsensical hope. Because how could a soul call her on a real telephone?
“Se?ora Walker,” the receptionist said. “I apologize for the disturbance. There is someone here to see you.”
Claire still hoped it was Matías, wanting to apologize. But then she realized that it couldn’t be him, because he’d just left. And the receptionist wouldn’t be able to see him anyway.
Was it Soledad or Aracely, here to reconcile?
“Do you want to come downstairs?” the receptionist said. “Or should I send her up?”
“Who is it?” Claire asked.
“She says you’ll know her as Abuela Gloria.”