The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In an ideal world, Fia might have taken the following day off work – lengthened an already long weekend. However, her period of annual leave in Dublin is fast approaching. She is conscious of the backlog that cannot be cleared, but must at least be reduced, before she goes. Furthermore, there’s an element of laying the groundwork to be done; people could feel very let down – practically slapped in the face, digitally speaking – by an unforeseen out of office response. Hence, she’s at her desk as promptly as ever on Friday morning, nose to the grindstone.
She is at least spared the hangover that some of her co-workers appear to be contending with – in the break room during the mid-morning coffee rush, the residual alcohol and anguish seems to seep from their very pores.
It’s the hottest day of the year so far, and in response, building management have gone with their usual strategy, which is to crank the a/c all the way up. The height of summer often makes for a very tricky wardrobe situation at ZOLA, with staff thus forced to choose between dressing for their commute (hotter than a furnace) or their workplace (chilled to morgue levels).
By noon, Fia’s reaching absently for her pashmina, wrapping it tightly around herself, when a red alert pops up on her computer screen.
Serve Alyvia Chestnut response and counterclaim,it says, and she switches over to her calendar, a little startled. How can it be time to do that already? She thought she had ages yet.
She tenses a little, steels herself to break the news to her office-mate.
‘Hey, Benjamin?’ she begins, and in the corner, he glances up at her.
Suddenly, Fia’s a slightly different sort of tense. After last night, things between the two of them are different, in a way that is undeniable and that neither of them have mentioned so far today. Fia isn’t sure how she would put it into words, even if she wanted to.
She could tell him, perhaps, that what he said to her was extremely unprofessional – she is his mentor, and they have to work together, and he has put her in a difficult position.
She could tell him that he’s created a lot of unnecessary complication in the midst of a situation – namely their secret marriage and equally secret and ongoing divorce – that they agreed to keep as simple as possible.
Can she tell him, though, that he was wrong – that the things he said were untrue?
At least in her own mind, Fia has to admit that she probably cannot. And there’s just something about him having said the quiet part out loud. It can’t be taken back.
She’s maybe been looking at him for a couple of seconds too long now, and he’s looking right back at her, a hint of a smile on his face as though he can read her mind. She swallows, tries to refocus on the matter at hand.
‘Uh … so, the thing is, I actually need to serve our response to Jonathan Chestnut today,’ she tells him. ‘Or next week, latest. If we wait ’til I’m back from Ireland, we’re going to be time-barred, and he’ll get a default judgment.’
Admitting it aloud, Fia winces slightly. For her to be caught on the hop like this, saved only by the gods of technology … that’s actually not especially unusual. Despite her best efforts, so often she seems to fall short – to avoid a fuck-up by no more than a hair’s breadth. Of course, that’s not always a question of her own failings. Part of it’s just about the volume of cases, the pace of things. Sometimes, in her job, it’s impossible to be anything but reactive.
On this occasion, though, she isn’t the only one affected. Whether she likes it or not, there seem to be two of them involved now, and Fia can’t help but curse herself all the more for that. Even last night, when she and Benjamin talked about the Chestnut case, no part of her thought they were running out of time.
Across the room, Benjamin seems to be putting the pieces together. ‘So, we can’t wait ’til Alyvia comes in again – with Gus – after all?’ he asks.
Fia winces again. ‘’Fraid not.’
Benjamin says nothing. And, as the seconds tick by, the rant she’d imagined would surely follow doesn’t come. She can tell by looking at him, though, that he’s far from thrilled.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she says, and how it has reached this point – the point at which she is willing to appease him, treat him like an equal – she has no idea. ‘I’ll deny the adultery on Alyvia’s part. And on the other stuff – our counterclaims about the online harassment – I’ll try to be vague. I just need to serve something before the deadline. We can always amend it down the line if necessary.’
Benjamin looks sceptical. ‘Mmm. I’m not sure how you can accuse this guy of being an online troll and sabotaging his family while also, like … not accusing him of it.’
‘Are you joking? Ben, we’re lawyers – that’s literally what we do.’
He sniggers, his resistance seeming to melt a little before her eyes. ‘Okay, cool,’ he replies then. ‘Yeah. Try to curb your sharklike tendencies.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she says, and as she looks back at her computer screen, she can feel the little smile on his lips – it’s the same one that’s pulling at hers.
At this point, she knows she probably won’t start the actual drafting until next week. She may even do it over the weekend, such are the extent of her Fourth of July plans. In the meantime, it occurs to her that, with Benjamin so focused on Alyvia, she might be wise to do a little digging on Jonathan Chestnut herself. While she’s not as talented an online sleuth as many others of her generation – she’s sure her sister, Maeve, could rival MI5 for the speed, depth and discretion of her investigations – she’s not totally incapable.
A ton of people come up when she googles Jonathan’s name, but it’s the image search that ultimately leads right to her source. In seconds, she spots a picture of him, Alyvia and Gus as a toddler, all of them grinning at Coney Island. It’s not quite the aesthetic of BabyGAndMe – even the perfectly imperfect, Instagram versus reality posts from Alyvia have a cultivated quality to them. This one is just a family, unfiltered, at the funfair. It makes Fia a little sad to look at it.
Jonathan himself apparently uploaded this photo to his Facebook account, and Fia pulls up the full profile, hoping for the best. There really is no predicting the permissions that other people might have set or failed to set on their social media accounts. Sadly, what new information she can glean about Jonathan Chestnut turns out to be fairly limited. He went to Rutgers University, he works for Bank of America and, six years ago, he contributed to someone’s JustGiving campaign in aid of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Added to that, one more photo – a much more recent one – is visible. It’s been taken at the beach and shows a man’s legs – Jonathan’s, presumably – with a woman’s, intertwined. My love, he’s captioned it.
The woman isn’t identifiable, but her skin tone, her body shape and the date all combine to let Fia know that it’s not Alyvia. Interesting, Fia thinks. So, Alyvia was right about that one – for a guy who is accusing his wife of cheating, he certainly hasn’t hung around.
Fia’s own Facebook profile has been dormant for some time, used now exclusively by aunts sending birthday wishes. Absently, she scrolls through her newsfeed, coming upon names she hasn’t seen or thought of in years – people she knew at school, people who once briefly dated some of her friends.
She looks up George for some reason, even though she never knew George to be active on Facebook. And, sure enough, there is nothing recent to see there, no hint at whatever life George might be living now – where or with whom. So, that’s that.
In any event, it’s unclear exactly how Fia ends up in the precise corner of this website that she eventually does. She’s been looking over an old chat with her sister, chucking internally at the text abbreviations they used back then, when somehow or other she finds herself faced with a list of private messages she’s never seen before. Most of them are of the singles in your area or the one weird trick to reduce belly fat variety. But then, in the midst of them, a name catches her eye. It takes a second for her to properly register it, in this context. There’s just a certain degree of incongruity, like seeing one’s teacher turn up in a H&M. She squints, making sure she hasn’t misread.
Benjamin Lowry,it says.
Instinctively, Fia looks over at the man himself, opening her mouth to get his attention. Equally instinctively, though, she soon thinks better of it. Her breath suspends in mid-air as he types away on his keyboard, oblivious, and she shuts her mouth again like a goldfish. She leans forwards a little in her chair, feeling her heart speed up when she sees the litany of messages.
There’s no profile picture on the account, just a generic, greyscale silhouette – and, when she clicks on his name, she can see he has no Facebook posts, no friends. As far as she can see, the communication with her constitutes Benjamin’s only activity on the site. She scrolls all the way back to the first attempt at contact. It is, she notes immediately, dated just nine months after the two of them got hitched.
15/05/2016, 18:24
Hi Fia – hope you’re good. You might have noticed some missed calls from me this past week. I know we talked about waiting a year before we settled things after what happened in LV. But, actually, I’m thinking maybe we should just go ahead and deal with it now? Not sure if you already have a lawyer on your side of the pond, but if not, maybe you would have a think about who you’ll want to use, and let me know. Like I said, I know we talked about waiting, but on reflection, I think that might have just been a really dumb idea (I know, I know, MY really dumb idea). I can handle things on this end with my mom. Benjamin
As Fia reaches the end of the message, it’s now almost impossible for her to stay quiet. Some exclamation of disbelief or the demand for an explanation is on the very tip of her tongue. Again, though, the greater part of her seems somehow to know that she should hold off. She has, after all, plenty more reading to be getting on with.
22/05/2016, 21:05
Hey Fia – just checking to see if you’ve had a chance to think about this? I know you weren’t totally sold on the whole ‘waiting’ thing anyhow, so I’m assuming you’ll be fine with getting the show on the road. Why postpone the inevitable, right? Have you managed to track down a lawyer yet? I’ll probably use a guy named Fred Malcolm – he’s at the firm of Malcolm, Jones and Frankfurt here in Durham, NC. I’ve made him aware of our situation, and he’s happy to have a quick chat with whoever you’re using, just to go over the process. Apparently, it could be a little slower with you being outside of the US, but obviously we can’t do anything about that. Ben
25/05/2016, 17:11
Fia – I’m not gonna lie, I’m starting to get a little worried that I haven’t heard from you. Is everything okay? I called your cell a couple more times today, but no reply. That’s the whole reason I set up this Facebook account, even though I really genuinely believe Mark Zuckerberg is the devil in a pair of loafers. Anyhow, if it’s a financial issue on your end, I can figure it out and cover the costs. My main thing right now is just to get this handled as soon as possible. I’ve actually been seeing someone for the past couple of months and, as you can imagine, being married to somebody else – even if just on paper – really isn’t ideal.
27/05/2016, 03:44
You know I can see your status updates, right? I know you’re on here. You can post thirty pictures of your friends at some stupid bar, and yet you can’t reply to me? Nice.
20/06/2016, 16:45
Okay, Fia. We’ve run the gamut here – I’ve been polite, I’ve been confused, I’ve been friendly, I’ve been angry. I’m gonna try laying it all out on the table. Seven months ago, I met a girl. Her name is Jessy. She’s a history major here at Duke University, and she’s the worst cook you’ve ever met in your life, and I’m crazy about her. I’ve never felt this way about anybody. But every time I look at her, I feel like I’m lying to her a little bit. The thought of telling her I already have a divorce under my belt before even graduating college kind of kills me inside, but the thought of telling her I’m still married is so, so much worse. I just don’t want anything to jeopardize what we have, and I don’t want there to be anything that stops our relationship moving forward. I guess it’s like they say – when you know, you know. And Jessy and I are both all in with this thing.
The situation between you and me is my baggage to deal with, not Jessy’s. I need you to help me deal with it, though. I’ve tried to give you some space – obviously I don’t know what shit you might have going on in your own life right now – but I’m feeling the weight of this whole mess more and more every day. I don’t care about my mom or her campaign or the money or any of it. I just want us to be divorced. Please get in touch. I’ll try calling you again this week if I don’t hear from you here.
02/07/2016, 11:38
Have you changed your number? I guess that’s probably clutching at straws given, you know, ALL THE ABOVE. Blanking me on this is just so low, Fia. One thing I know for sure is that you don’t want to be married to me. But the fact that I don’t want to be married to you … that’s what’s going to make you cling on, isn’t it? I get it, that’s kind of how things were with us. But this really isn’t a game anymore. It’s just not an opportunity for you to get the upper hand. I want to move on with my life and propose to my girlfriend. Literally not sure how much clearer I can make that. Can you imagine if the situation were reversed, if you were the one left contacting me over and over, wondering where to go next? ’Cause I can. You would be having a fit.
02/07/2016, 11:45
I feel like I need to tell Jessy, one way or another. Keeping this a secret is killing me, and she’s starting to see that something’s up. I have no idea how she’s going to take it. You are seriously just blowing my fucking mind with this, Fia. I thought you were a lot of things, but I didn’t think you were cruel.
02/07/2016, 11:46
Please.
At last, Fia finishes, her heart going a mile a minute now. She tries to drag the cursor downwards, as though more will magically appear. It doesn’t, though. That single word – dating back seven years, almost to the day, is all she’s left with.
She knows that the time for restraint, for information gathering, is over now. It’s time to talk to Benjamin. And, handily or horrendously, he’s sitting only four feet away.
But, still, when she opens her mouth, she just can’t seem to find the words.