The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Two
Fia doesn’t wait for the lifts. She can’t bear to cram into one alongside Benjamin – or alongside anyone else, for that matter. Instead, the moment the vestibule begins to fill with people, she slips into the back stairwell. As fast as her high heels can carry her, she skips down the stairs, taking them two at a time, three at a time.
She must have gone down ten floors already when she trips, her ankle seizing painfully. She’s a runner – she knows enough to feel confident that there’s nothing seriously wrong – but it makes her stop all the same, a curse hissed instinctively into the silence. It’s then she realizes that she’s breathless, that her head is spinning madly.
She clutches at the banister and waits for this dizziness to subside, attempting to somehow gather herself. Of course, a bomb (in the form of a human being) has just detonated right in front of her. She can hardly blame her body for noticing it. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t do for anyone to see her like this. She operates in a certain way at ZOLA, after all: a place for everything, and everything in its place. That goes for her own emotions every bit as much as for all those hard-copy documents the firm insists she retain in duplicate.
She will go down to the lobby, she decides, giving her head a little shake. Logic, problem-solving, objectivity – those are the parts of herself she needs to reach for, now more than ever. She begins to walk again, making herself breathe evenly, all the way down fifty more flights of stairs. This time, she moves slowly. She allows herself at least that brief respite, at least these few stolen moments of solitude.
Once she’s reached the lobby, though, bodies zipping around her in all directions, there is nothing else for it. No matter that the anonymity of Madison Avenue seems to call to her – no matter the urge to just run, her sore ankle be damned – she has no choice but to take the lift all the way back up to her little office on the fifty-eighth floor and try to recommence some semblance of a morning.
Apparently, the summer associates will be occupied with welcome and training sessions for the entire remainder of the day. And so, that’s something. What it turns out to provide for Fia, more than anything else, is plenty of lovely time to stare out the window, questioning all the choices she’s ever made in her life and where they’ve got her.
By noon, she hasn’t done a tap of work. Instead, she sips absently at her coffee, gazing out at Manhattan in the June sunshine, at the endless windows of other office buildings just like her own. Her mind just won’t stop racing as she tries, yet again, to devise a way out of this thing.
She could say that she’s reassessed her workload, realized that she simply doesn’t have the capacity to take on a summer associate this year after all.
Immediately, though, the flaw in that thinking is evident to her. Absolutely everyone at ZOLA is busy, all the time. Complaining about this unchangeable reality has a way of making people look not so much overworked as under-efficient. And what was it Celia said back in the spring? She said that Fia needed some formal experience of supervising others before the firm could promote her. The type of thing she already does with the paralegals is good, but it doesn’t quite tick the box.
The prospect of said box being left unticked, maybe for a whole ’nother year, does not exactly fill Fia with joy. At this point, she is quite keen to begin doing, on an official basis, the job she has actually already been doing for some time now, albeit with none of the accompanying benefits: senior associate. The bumped up title and pay grade feel tantalizingly close.
Some sort of exchange, then, perhaps. Might there be any way to make that happen without, as Benjamin had implied earlier, having to spill all the mortifying details of their history? Without having to publicly out herself, to all her bosses and co-workers, as a total moron? If there is, Fia can’t think of it. How can she go to Celia Hannity and say: ‘about the summer associates. I want one, I just don’t want that one?’
She can’t, really. An explanation would inevitably be required.
She’s draining the last of her coffee, every drop like liquid hopelessness, when, in the atrium outside her office, a kerfuffle catches her attention.
Around the perimeter of the fifty-eighth floor, all the lawyers’ doors and walls are made, needless to say, of glass – and beyond, in the open-plan area, sit two dozen paralegals and secretaries. There is absolutely nothing Fia can do inside her little cubby – as a matter of fact, she’d wager there is nothing she does do – without being observed by at least one of them. But then, that works both ways. Sitting up a bit straighter at her desk now, craning her neck a little, she can see a horde of people lingering by the printers.
It’s the summer associates, she realizes, presumably being in some way instructed or inducted. She finds Benjamin amid the group fairly easily, now that she knows enough to look for him. The morning’s events, then, were not some sort of psychological break on her part, some horrendous dissociation with reality. He’s actually here.
For no other reason than that the opportunity presents itself, Fia studies him for a moment. It is, first of all, entirely bizarre to see him in a suit. In her mind, he exists in shorts and T-shirts, perhaps jeans and a button-down at a push. She would once have imagined he’d look utterly ridiculous in more formal attire. He doesn’t, though – she has to admit that, as she takes in every inch of him, from his dark brown hair all the way down to his fancy leather dress shoes. Of course, he’s one of the older people in the bunch – maybe even the oldest. But that is not necessarily any bad thing. So many of the other summer associates just have that look, like kids dressed up in their parents’ clothes. Benjamin – again, honesty compels Fia to admit it – wears his extra few years well.
Weirdly, the whole exercise makes her wonder what she looks like today – or rather, what she looked like when he first set eyes on her earlier.
This is weird because, of all the topics that Fia’s brain is known to rewind and review on a loop, her own physical appearance is very rarely among them.
Of course, there was a short while, in adolescence, when she fretted over this or that, when she was convinced that her future success and happiness – both with the opposite sex and in general – was linked to making herself look a certain way. However, she had realized earlier than most that what society valued in women, much more so than great beauty, was simply thinness. If thinness was combined with any sort of nonthreatening aesthetic, then of course a woman’s life was not necessarily going to be a bed of roses, but her appearance was not going to be a thing making it any more difficult. She could get a job, get a man, get an outfit, all without undue hassle.
Fia happens to be thin – wiry, she’d probably say, herself – and she seems destined always to be so. And honestly, that has taken a lot of the pressure off, looks-wise. She does not think she could develop Kardashian curves if she tried, and she suspects she might not be the most elegant walker in heels – but she has long legs, lean arms, and she enjoys the sense of herself as being somehow a little scrappy. She feels capable inside her own body. In this regard, as in most others, she is pragmatic.
Still, she finds herself taking out a little compact mirror from her handbag, peering into it discreetly at her desk.
She’s not sure what she was expecting to see, really. It’s just her face: pale skin, blue eyes, red hair that, blessedly, remains mostly contained within its bun at the nape of her neck. Left to its own devices, Fia’s hair is a bird’s nest of curls reaching halfway down her back. There’s a way to wrangle it – to make it look much more like a statement than a surrender. On the occasions over the years when she has committed herself to a multistage process of combing, diffusing and seruming, she’s actually received some very effusive compliments about it, mainly from drunk strangers in public bathrooms. At work, though, for lack of the time or energy to do much else, she always goes for the bun.
‘You look stunning,’ comes a voice then, and Fia freezes instantly. This time, she doesn’t even need to look up to know exactly who it is.