The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Thirteen
By the time the workday finally ends, Fia is like a caged animal. The moment she can escape the office, she’s out of there, stopping only briefly at her apartment to change clothes. Then, she’s back outside again, and it’s all about the stretch of her calves, the thud of her feet against the ground, the blood pumping in her veins. She’s been running more in the past ten days – longer distances, faster speeds – than she thinks she ever has in her life. It feels, at this point, like the only thing keeping her even halfway sane.
That, and the thought of the Summer Summit. The thought of going home home. It’s just three short weeks, now, before Fia will be leaving Benjamin behind in Manhattan with the secretaries and the paralegals and heading off to Dublin with the other lawyers.
Of course, once she arrives, there’ll be the work aspect of things to endure. She’ll have to look interested in boring things, and she’ll have to enquire after so many people’s children. But that will only be for three days. At the end of the conference, she’s taken some precious annual leave, so that she’ll get to be home for more than a week in total. No Benjamin, no Alyvia Chestnut, none of her own or other people’s legal problems. Just the thought of letting her mam and dad look after her is completely, utterly heavenly. At this point, Fia hasn’t actually been back in Ireland for more than eighteen months; her parents and siblings came to New York last Christmas. It’s the longest she’s ever been away, and – for that and probably other reasons – she feels like she’s been pining for the respite of Dublin more keenly than ever before.
Right now, though, the evening air is a tonic; cooler and less humid than during the day, it makes her feel instantly enlivened. She puts her headphones in, setting a buoyant pace across 81st Street as she falls into step with the rhythm of her music. There is something about a soundtrack that just makes one’s life feel a lot more cinematic. And, right now, honestly, Fia would have to say things are already fairly cinematic on the Upper East Side.
Weaving her way towards Central Park, she runs past brownstones bathed in peachy light, past people walking their silly bougie pets and that hotdog stand she likes on Lexington. The frozen yoghurt shop on 5th Avenue that seems to have had a constant line outside it for weeks is doing a roaring trade. Then, she’s in the park, the beeps and screeches of traffic dampening a bit, and all around her she can see buskers, yogis, little kids on scooters, people in suits and people in shorts, tourists taking pictures – the hum of life in all its diversity.
It’s at times like this – when she has music, movement, Manhattan – that Fia feels she is at the very centre of the universe. The city is so all-encompassing that she struggles even to really think of Dublin, or indeed anywhere else, in a concrete fashion. How impossible it is to look around and truly grasp that out there, right this second, whole other cities exist, too. Across the ocean, her parents will be methodically checking window latches, unplugging electrical items, pouring glasses of water before bed. Those things are definitely true. And yet, they feel so remote. The world seems instead to begin at the Hudson and end at the East River – that’s what George always used to say.
Fia feels a slight pang, thinking about that. Another one. Sometimes, she can go weeks and weeks without thinking about George Ferarra at all. Other days, it seems downright cruel how many small, stubborn, reminders of her pop up at every turn.
The thing is, the two of them had a friendship that really could only be described as romantic. Fia knows that might sound odd, proclaimed aloud. She probably never would proclaim it aloud, for exactly that reason. But it’s true. They had even had a meet-cute, right here in Central Park.
Fia was out running on the Sunday morning in question, the Autumn leaves in all their glory around her. Back then, running wasn’t so much about the endorphin boost, or even the physical fitness – it was mostly just about giving herself something to do. Almost all her time was taken up with work – seventy hours a week, she wished desperately for a break. But then, it was the strangest thing. Once she did manage to escape the office, she found herself struggling to fill the time. How could that be so, in New York City, of all places? She didn’t quite understand it herself – certainly she didn’t know how to explain it to anyone she’d left behind in Ireland – but that was how she felt.
Anyway. She was jogging perfectly uneventfully through the park that Sunday morning when she realized she’d gone past the path she wanted – or at least, she thought maybe she had. It was hard to tell.
She turned on her heel, pulling her phone out to check the map, and that was when it happened: she slammed right into another runner, the pair of them colliding in a brutal mash of limbs, water somehow spilling all over the place from their respective bottles.
‘What the fuck?!’ this stranger exclaimed, more in shock than in anger. Still, though, Fia was instinctively a little intimidated.
‘Sorry! I …’
She stopped, then, to really take in the person before her. Oddly, Fia realized she’d seen this girl before – here in the park, running. She had sleek jet-black hair and perfect, black arched eyebrows. Add in the olive skin and shapely figure, and the full effect was just about the polar opposite of Fia herself, looks-wise. In the past few weeks, Fia had spotted the girl over and over, and she’d been struck by the coincidence of it, in a city of this size, intrigued by the evident parallel in their schedules. She’d begun to think of this stranger as kind of her counterpart – even an alternate version of herself, somehow. She’d used her sometimes to help measure and better her own pace along the running paths. She’s two trees’ distance ahead of me today, Fia would think to herself. I can get that down to one.
Of course, she admitted none of that, post-collision.
‘Sorry,’ she repeated instead. ‘I was looking for the 66th Street exit but I realized I’d gone past it.’ She offered a chagrined sort of smile. ‘I just moved here.’
At the time, this seemed like the single most significant, and most obvious, fact about her. At any given moment of any given day, she felt sure that a blind man could have seen that she, Fia Callaghan, had just moved to New York City.
The other girl smiled, everything about her seeming to brighten with interest. ‘Hey, me too,’ she replied, and she stuck out her hand. ‘Just arrived from D.C. two months ago. I’m George Ferarra. Georgina, really, but everybody calls me George.’
Americans were excellent at that, Fia always thought – they introduced themselves right away, even when it seemed like an interaction was going to be a short-term one. In Dublin, you could easily speak to someone every day for a year without knowing their name, by which point it seemed humiliating to ask.
‘I’ve seen you here before,’ George added then. ‘… I mean, if that’s not too weird a thing to say.’
Fia just smiled. Before she could even get a response out, her enthusiasm seemed to have emboldened the other girl.
‘Can I tell you another secret?’ she asked.
‘Do it!’ Fia tossed back, a proper grin beginning to pull at her lips. It was hard to explain, the way George just managed to make her feel exactly like herself right from the get-go.
‘Sometimes, when you’re running, I try to beat you.’
Fia could only laugh out loud, full-throated and giddy, her own reciprocal admission following easily.
And so, that was how it started. The two of them jogged together for a bit afterwards, chatting all the while, and eventually they stopped at a coffee kiosk near the playground. They sat on a bench, drinking takeaway lattes and watching little kids squeal with laughter on the monkey bars. It was one of the first times Fia could remember seeing anything in New York that did not appear to have making or spending money at its heart. People, apparently, were living real lives here. They were taking their toddlers to the park. She, too, was living a real life here, it seemed. She was working in Midtown during the week, just like everybody else, and exercising in Central Park on the weekend. She was making a new friend.
After that day, things moved fast. Fia and George quickly became pretty much inseparable. They lived no more than five minutes’ walk away from one another on the Upper East Side, and it felt as though there was something a little bit miraculous, something a little bit meant-to-be about that. Together, they explored the city, so many options opening up to each of them by virtue of having a wingwoman. Fia no longer had any difficulty whatsoever in occupying herself outside of work. She and George stayed out late and drank too much, safe in the knowledge that they’d be sharing a taxi home. They made pilgrimages to the Empire State Building and Magnolia Bakery, to the Statue of Liberty and the museum on Ellis Island – all activities Fia would have been mortified to suggest to any of the new people she’d met at ZOLA, much less to the three roommates she was living with at the time, all of whom seemed extremely, constantly busy.
Even after those first early weeks and months of friendship passed – once they could no longer be called a whirlwind romance – something richer and more lovely took its place. Fia and George began to clock up birthdays, Thanksgivings, Saint Patrick’s Days together. A patchwork history developed, their lives increasingly interweaving until, more often than not, George’s became the first text Fia typically got in the morning and the last one she got at night. Their workdays were peppered with memes and in-jokes, stream-of-consciousness nonsense. Fia could honestly tell her mother back in Dublin that if she got run over and killed by a cab on a Friday night, at least one person in Manhattan would definitely notice this in advance of her not showing up to work on Monday morning.
Any time Fia passed Sarge’s Deli and Diner, she’d call in and get George a slice of the cheesecake she loved, dropping it in unannounced on her way home. Before they went out out, a ritual developed where George – a dab hand at the smoky eye – would do her own makeup first, then Fia’s, the two of them sipping cava together in George’s tiny studio. Tragically (given the way things panned out), Fia is, to this day, pretty sure that she’s never looked better than on the nights when George did her face. So many good times in dive bars and on rooftops, before they’d return unsteadily to one or other of their places, I love yous murmured drunkenly before sleep.
As Fia makes her way back to her apartment now, forcing herself to slow her pace a little, she plays and replays all those moments and many more besides. She’s just not sure what she is meant to do with the memories. Is she supposed to have reached the stage of looking back fondly? Is she supposed to have forgotten them altogether? The attempt to box them up in her brain – the very same strategy she employed so successfully when it came to, say, Benjamin Lowry – just doesn’t seem to have worked so well with George.
It was never a sexual thing between them. Fia doesn’t think she would necessarily have to clarify that point, were she telling the story to another woman, and she’s absolutely sure she would, were she telling the story to a man. She would probably have to say it twice. It was never a sexual thingbetween us. Fia never wanted it to be so, nor did she ever get the slightest hint that George did. Imagining, though, some fantasy scenario in which George had initiated something … who knows? Looking back on it now, Fia can’t say with 100 per cent certainty how she would have felt about that or what she would have done in response. Their usual gender preferences aside, the two of them certainly were not without the basic ingredients that tended to make for good sex. With George – more so than with any boyfriend she’d ever had – Fia felt understood, intimately; she felt like part of a pair; she felt interesting, valuable, beautiful in someone else’s eyes.
When all was said and done, it really was very simple. For those first couple of years in New York, George Ferarra had been the absolute love of her life.