“Rosie tucked a curl behind her ear, her eyes jumping very briefly to Aaron and then returning to me. ‘I think he’s referring to the moment he offered to be your date to your sister’s wedding,’ she explained in a soft voice. ‘You know, right after you told me that things had changed and that now you needed to find someone—or anyone, I think you said—to go to Spain with you and attend that wedding because, otherwise, you die a slow, painful death and—’”

Before the actual narrative begins, Elena Armas lets the reader know that Aaron overheard Lina expressing the need for a wedding date. Aaron immediately volunteers, and Lina immediately rejects him. Throughout this strained conversation, Lina and Aaron use Rosie as a sort of translator, with Lina repeatedly refusing Aaron’s request as she doesn’t think he’s being serious. The essence of their relationship for the majority of the novel is captured in this exchange: Lina cannot believe Aaron feels affection for her, and Aaron wants to make his affection known.

“There it was. The truth. The real reason why I, among the four other people sitting in this room, had been hand-picked to do this damn thing. I was a woman—the only woman in the division, leading a team—and I had the goods, no matter how generous my curves were or not. Perky, cute, female. I was the attractive option apparently. I was being showcased to our clients as the golden token that prove that InTech was not stuck in the past.”

One of Armas’s themes deals with the continued prevalence of male bias against women in the workplace. While any professional woman would feel insulted in being handed a sudden assignment simply because she was attractive, this is even more problematic for Lina, who left Spain because she was falsely accused of achieving excellence through “feminine wiles” rather than her intellect.

“I was over him; I truly was. But, man, all that had happened had...messed me up. I realized that now—not because it’d suddenly hit me that I had been single for years, but because I had lied—and what was worse was, I had just made up my mind not to go back on my lie.”

Lina’s escape from Spain had less to do with her and Daniel’s breakup and more to do with three other factors: the cruel rumors regarding the relationship, the insensitive manner in which Daniel broke off the relationship, and her family’s inability to grasp what was truly troubling her.