The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Chapter Twelve

They go down to the lobby to see Alyvia off, and even as he’s waving to her from the other side of the security turnstile, Benjamin shakes his head a little, his exhale coming in a whoosh.

‘Wow. That woman is lying through her teeth,’ he murmurs. ‘I’m not sure how exactly, but she definitely is.’

Fia waits to be certain Alyvia is well on her way before she turns to Benjamin, all scorn. ‘Oh yeah. She’s got to be lying, right? Or crazy. Or both! I’m sure this guy she’s accusing of abusing her is probably actually the victim.’

Benjamin lets out a huff of irritation. ‘That’s not what I said. But I mean, my God, she can’t seem to answer a straight question.’

‘Well, you certainly had plenty of questions lined up for her, didn’t you?’

‘You didn’t seem to have any,’ he fires back. ‘Or none of the hard ones, at least.’

‘I was getting to it! There’s a way to handle these things. What part of don’t talk was hard for you to understand?’

Benjamin blasts right past that one, with no apparent awareness of the irony involved in doing so. Evidently, neither self-awareness nor irony are among his strong suits. ‘So, what?’ he says instead. ‘We’re just supposed to take her word for it, when she tells us her husband is the one behind that account?’

‘What else would you suggest? You want to put a tracker on his phone? Creep around Manhattan after him, invite his confidence in some cocktail bar? News flash, Benjamin, this is not Suits. This is not The Good Wife. Taking our client’s word for it is kind of a core part of the gig.’

‘We could subpoena Instagram,’ he suggests. ‘That happened all the time when I was at GameCab. It seemed like courts were constantly making us disclose people’s IP addresses for one reason or another. Wouldn’t that be helpful to our case – to know it’s definitely Jonathan?’

Fia purses her lips, unable to issue an outright denial. ‘Potentially,’ she says.

‘And even if Jonathan is behind the posts,’ Benjamin continues, ‘can we say for sure they’re untrue? Didn’t you think Alyvia was super weird about that?’

‘The kid certainly looks happy enough, if the pictures are anything to go by,’ Fia replies. She’s no stranger herself to evading a question she’d rather not directly answer. ‘I’d say he looks like he has everything a child could possibly want, actually.’

‘I guess if we don’t count the super annoying mother,’ Benjamin mutters, almost as though to himself. He manages to take note of her glare though, his eyes widening in self-defence. ‘I’m sorry, but she is pretty annoying.’

Once again, Fia finds herself unable to explicitly contradict him there. She hates that. ‘Well, you know what, Benjamin?’ she says hotly. ‘That’s how it goes. You wanted to be on this case so badly? Congratulations – you’re on it. Five years from now, ten years from now, when you’re busy getting people off death row or whatever, I guarantee you that some of them will be the biggest arseholes you’ve ever met in your life. You don’t get to pick the clients. You don’t always get to like them. But Alyvia Chestnut is our client now. It’s not our job to make this process more difficult for her. And you heard what she said – that guy Jonathan has made her life miserable for the last six months! Don’t you think she’s been through enough?’

Horrifyingly, Fia realizes she’s almost breathless at the end of this little speech, having picked up speed and volume all the way along. And, by the end of it, she’s not altogether sure she’s talking only about Alyvia. Her voice cracks slightly on that final question. She feels, suddenly, as though it might not take very much for tears to spring to her eyes, right here in ZOLA’s lobby – not from sadness but from sheer tension and tiredness. Perhaps that’s why she says the next thing. She forces herself to take a deep breath first, with a quick glance around to ensure they haven’t been overheard so far.

‘Look. You want to do it that way? With us? Because the Alyvia and Jonathan model … that’s what divorce can be, Benjamin. A huge, toxic, expensive, time-consuming, public mess.’

He just shrugs.

‘No, no – answer me. You don’t get to shrug your way out of this one. Do you want to do that? Because if you do, that’s fine. We don’t have to go down the mediation route with Susan. Feel free to find yourself another lawyer – someone who’s available immediately, and someone who’s never so much as heard of me or this firm. And then we can go ahead and start making this as terrible as it possibly can be. After all, you know I know what I’m doing. Ours will be your first divorce but it won’t be mine.’

She delivers the whole thing with impressive flourish, if she does say so herself, and with it, she finally manages to cow him a little. His mouth twists in displeasure.

‘Some things never change, do they?’ he mutters, after a moment. ‘It’s your way or the highway, right? You always know best.’ His eyes shift to the floor, darting about uncomfortably, and when he speaks again, he’s barely looking at her. ‘Whatever. We can use your woman. The attorney mediator. What do I care?’

Fia knows this is as wholehearted an agreement as she’s ever going to get, as much of an active participant as she can ever expect him to be.

‘Great. I’ll confirm for next week then,’ she says tightly. She’s got what she wanted, but right now, it somehow doesn’t feel like much of a triumph. She simply cannot bear the notion of going back upstairs to sit beside him all afternoon. She needs a breather, needs an opportunity to collect herself without him right there to witness it. She gestures past the turnstile, towards the same revolving doors that Alyvia has just exited.

‘I haven’t eaten yet. I’m going to go grab lunch,’ she says.

Benjamin offers a grunt of acquiescence, and she’s already on her way when he speaks again, a bit of a warning in his tone now.

‘I’m going to draft that subpoena for Instagram, though. And I’m gonna do some more digging into this whole defamation thing generally. It’s our job to represent the clients – I get that – but I don’t think that means we just take down exactly what they tell us, fill in the form, and done. Sorry. That’s not the kind of lawyer I want to be.’

Fia swallows thickly, sensing her heartbeat quicken. How can it be, that she suddenly feels like she’s the one who might be floundering here?

It’s this case, she thinks: the not-quite-standard nature of it, the way it’s been thrust upon her today, the way it threatens to push her slightly outside her comfort zone.

And of course, yet again, the problem is Benjamin, too: his mere presence, yes, but also his questions that she cannot exactly answer; his snippets of knowledge that she hasn’t provided; the fact that he appears to have selected Alyvia Chestnut’s divorce as the one area in which he will refuse to be passive.

‘Have at it,’ she replies flatly. And then, she hardly knows why she says it: ‘I have another box of photocopying that I’ll need back for tomorrow, too.’

It’s just the most familiar way, at this point, to reassert herself as officially the one in charge. Never mind that in doing so, she is surely only reconfirming all his worst prejudices against her.

For a moment, silence.

‘Sure,’ Benjamin replies, with a curt little nod. He just can’t seem to leave it alone, though – it’s as though maybe his own efforts to contain himself have finally failed altogether when he pipes up again. ‘You know you’re not my boss, right, Fia? I mean, just so we’re completely clear about that.’

More dead air follows, tension pulsing between them.

‘… I’m your senior,’ she replies.

Benjamin doesn’t miss a beat. ‘That’s for sure. How’s 30 treating you?’

It’s such a stupid dig – really so incredibly dumb and meaningless – but still it manages to grind Fia’s gears. She absolutely hated turning 30, hates being 30, hates the thought of all the 30-somethings that are to come. What she doesn’t hate – at all, actually – is her life at 30. She just would like to still be 27 and living it. She would even settle, as it happens, for Benjamin’s 29.

‘The point is: you’re supposed to be providing me with emotional support this summer,’ he continues, all mock-earnestness.

‘I’m supposed to be providing you with an insight into the practice of law at a big corporate firm,’ she snaps. ‘There’s literally zero emotional support involved in that, let me tell you.’

‘Still, you know I get to evaluate you at the end of the summer, too, right?’

‘Whatever,’ she replies impatiently. ‘I’ll be back in twenty minutes.’

And as she flashes her security pass, strides through the turnstile and out towards Madison Avenue in search of food, Fia’s mind races all the while. She can feel heat flooding through her whole body, and it has nothing to do with the rising Midtown temperatures.

She had, in fact, not known that.