Obsession (Year of Fire) Read Online Free Page B

child’s play. Breaking into the laboratories, gathering evidence and getting out again was what they were trained for. Nonetheless, he would exhaust the other alternatives before taking such an extreme measure. Roy Blahetter’s recent appearance could not be considered a coincidence.

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CHAPTER 2
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    Roy Blahetter asked Matilde if they could have a few words in private. She felt unable to refuse with her father standing right in front of her.
    “Don’t be long,” Juana warned her. “I want to go to the duty-free shop before we board.”
    Roy shot his wife’s friend a withering glance and took Matilde’s arm to guide her somewhere a little more private. Once they had put some distance between them and the others, he tried to kiss her. Matilde turned her face away.
    “I disgust you, don’t I?” Matilde looked at her feet and pressed her lips together. “You never loved me. I should have realized that when we were engaged.” He patted his head, smoothing down his hair. “But I was so crazy about you that I wouldn’t have known if it had hit me in the face. I confused modesty and virginity with coldness.”
    Matilde made as if to return to her group; Blahetter took her by the arm and pulled her back toward him. She shook him off.
    “Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Don’t get on that plane. Don’t leave me.”
    “Roy.” Matilde always spoke in a very quiet voice so that he had to duck to hear her; he was more than a head taller than she. “I’m not abandoning you. You and I are separated, and soon we’ll be divorced. Who told you I was leaving? My father?”
    “No, your aunt Enriqueta.”
    “Aunt Enriqueta.” She adored her aunt, and admired the fortitude with which she had overcome the problems in her life: first her alcoholism, Grandmother Celia’s opposition to her artistic career and, finally, the death of her husband, which almost drove her back to the drink.
    “Did you tell her why I left your house? Why I left you?”
    “Our house,” he corrected. “It’s our house. And no, I didn’t say anything because I don’t tell people about our private life, unlike you, telling everything to that idiot Juana Folicuré.”
    “Come on, Mat!” Juana called.
    “I have to go.”
    “I love you, Matilde!”
    He grabbed hold of her shoulders and shook her. Matilde slowly raised her head to look at him, and Blahetter waited with bated breath until their gazes met. His wife looked like a teenager, even though she was almost twenty-seven. She was five foot two and weighed 110 pounds—he had always felt as though he could pick her up with just one hand. Nonetheless, he had learned that she wasn’t to be trifled with.
    “Get your hands off me.”
    Blahetter obeyed, slowly.
    “You know it’s true, you know that I love you,” he insisted, more calmly. “I turned my back on my family for you. I fought with my grandfather.”
    “I fought with my grandmother. If you remember, she didn’t like the idea of your being Jewish at all.”
    “You weren’t close to your grandmother Celia. But I had an excellent relationship with my grandfather Guillermo. Thanks to you, I was thrown out of the family businesses. I’m ruined.”
    “Now you can go back, recoup your losses and marry your lover.”
    “She doesn’t mean anything to me.”
    “She does to me, Roy.”
    “You can’t blame me for having looked for a lover.”
    “Good-bye, Roy.” He grabbed hold of her again.
    “I told you not to touch me.”
    “Okay. I’m sorry. Are you going to see my brother in Paris?” He asked quickly, to keep her talking.
    “Of course. Ezequiel is one of my best friends. He’s going to pick us up at the airport and take us to Aunt Enriqueta’s apartment in the Latin Quarter. We’ve never been to Paris, of course.”
    “Could you give him this letter?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Thank you, my love.”
    Matilde took the letter and put it in her shika , a low-slung backpack made from the chaguar plant