The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘You’ll probably barely even see him,’ Annie says, when she hears the news. ‘Didn’t you say, like, a billion people go to this thing – like, from all the different branches of your firm?’
Kavita jumps in, right on cue. ‘Plus, you’re staying with your parents, right – as opposed to at the hotel with everyone else? I agree – you can totally avoid him. And, I mean, work stuff is work stuff. Benjamin in your office in New York, Benjamin in some conference room in Ireland … what’s the difference, really?’
In some intangible, indescribable sort of way, it feels like quite a big difference to Fia. Nonetheless, by midweek, and for lack of much else to do, she has come around somewhat, chosen to believe her roommates unless and until they are actively proven incorrect.
If nothing else, she’s grateful not to have had to explicitly discuss the matter with Benjamin, having blamed Monday’s hasty exit on some unrelated – and entirely fictional – matter. Of course, Benjamin didn’t really buy that. Fia could see it written all over his stupid grinning face, the second she arrived back into the office after seeing Celia. He knew she’d been caught unawares. Thankfully, though, he didn’t quiz her any further, didn’t especially rub it in. Frankly, he made things a lot easier on her than she made things on him, when it came to his misunderstanding about the visa situation.
Now, it’s late on Wednesday evening – much later than Fia generally likes to be in the office, really, but it cannot be helped. She’s certainly not the only one still around. While the sky outside is pitch black, there are lights in the windows of all the neighbouring buildings. And, on the fifty-eighth floor of her own building, the lights are very much still on, too. With her office door flung open, every so often Fia hears a burst of chatter from the break room, spots co-workers criss-crossing the atrium, ties loosened by now, high heels slipped off.
In other words, the lateness of the hour does not, at least, translate to creepiness. Fia has tried to explain this to her very worried mother once or twice: that on the occasions where it is not accompanied by huge time pressure, being at ZOLA after hours like this can actually be sort of nice. There’s something about the calm of the place, the camaraderie, the commiseration. At some point after 8 p.m. this evening, everyone still around had gone in on a mammoth Grubhub order from the Vietnamese place nearby, and it felt almost festive, padding into the break room to poke through cardboard containers, see what surprises were on offer.
All that said, by 9.30 p.m., there are still so many things on her to-do list. Even as she finishes drafting ten codicils for wills, a stack of trust documents wait on her desk, all to be checked for accuracy. It isn’t a particularly complex job, just time-consuming, and she can’t restrain a weary exhale when she looks at them. As it happens, this is not overly what she wants to be doing with her one wild and precious life.
In the corner, she senses eyes flicking towards her at the sound of her sigh, but by the time she looks up, Benjamin’s gaze has shifted away again. Because, yes, Benjamin is here, too.
As though he can perhaps feel her regarding him now, he glances back upwards, meeting her eyes this time.
‘Your hair …’ he mumbles.
And, for a second, Fia has no idea what he’s talking about. She frowns, reaching a hand up towards her hair instinctively. She’s pulled it down from the bun, she realizes, so that it’s tumbling down past her shoulders, doubtless as voluminous as ever. She ruffles at her scalp a little, sweeping unruly strands back from her face. ‘What about it?’ she asks.
There’s a funny sort of expression on his face, one she can’t quite pinpoint. ‘Nothing, it’s just … it’s how I remember it, that’s all,’ he says quietly, before they each return – somewhat hurriedly, it might be said – to their respective tasks.
It doesn’t take long for peace to settle between them again. And, as he types away, as she reaches for the next document in her pile, Fia finds herself suddenly very aware of just that: the sense of peace. That peace might ever reign in this little office would once have seemed unthinkable – an entirely, absolutely unachievable thing. So, what has changed? On his end, perhaps Benjamin has found himself less inclined to deliberately press her buttons since learning that she hasn’t in fact used him for immigration purposes.
On hers, she’s not quite sure. She’s reminded, though, of something that her mother has always said: There is no such thing as quality time. There is only time.
Inside the confines of these four walls, over the course of the summer so far, Fia and Benjamin probably haven’t said or done anything very significant in the grand scheme of things. There certainly have been no tears or apologies or the like. She still wouldn’t have to think too hard to come up with the top five most annoying and/or perhaps fundamentally immoral things he’s ever done. Nonetheless, it would seem that the simple fact of having been in one another’s presence, unavoidably, for hours and hours, has perhaps begun to have some sort of impact. It may have started to rub the very sharpest points from their corners, made them just a little softer on each other, even when they collide.
It helps to know their divorce is well and truly underway. It helps to see that he is trying, at work; no matter what he’d implied at the beginning, he’s evidently a lot more conscientious than Fia initially thought. It helps that he is nice to security guards and paralegals and partners alike. It helps that he is, occasionally, quite amusing.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him moving now, pushing back in his chair a little, stretching his neck from side to side.
‘Do you want to see something cool?’ he asks her, and she looks over at him, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.
‘What kind of thing?’
‘God!’ he replies, the word exhaled on a half-laugh. For a moment, he just studies her. ‘How ’bout this, Fia? How ’bout you have to just … trust me.’
Trust him.
That seems like quite a big ask, given his background when it comes to repaying trust. It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell him exactly that, and yet, for some reason, she doesn’t.
The thing is that, so often in her life, she’s been able identify moments like this only in retrospect, if at all. But there is just something about the expression on his face now, the tone of his voice: this is a rare occasion on which Fia can tell – right this second, live – that she has arrived at something of an inflection point. She could pass, politely, keep him at a distance. She could consider the fact that she and Benjamin Lowry are now able to mostly sit in professional – maybe even companionable – silence to be a major win, and leave it at that. Or she could show herself receptive, let them inch towards something …
Well, something else.
Some sort of a work-friendship, she tells herself. A temporary one, for the remainder of the summer and until their divorce is done once and for all.
That would probably be to her benefit, on a purely practical level. It could help reduce her stress levels back to somewhere near normal. Plus, she’s grown so very irritatingly curious about him – that’s the truth of the matter. Where once she saw absolutely no depth, no reason for intrigue, in Benjamin Lowry, now she finds herself less and less sure that’s right. She wants to find out what other people see in him. She doesn’t want to be left with him, the way she has been with George: left wondering.
And so, she glances at the stack of paperwork on her desk, sighing again heavily. It does present a fairly unappealing prospect. However, that’s not the only reason she looks back at him, holding his gaze for a second or two, clicking her tongue against her teeth.
‘Okay, fine. I’ll trust you,’ she says quietly. ‘Just this once.’