The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Twenty-Eight
For hours and hours, Fia says nothing. This is not because she is figuring out how best to broach the subject or preparing any sort of grand speech in her mind – not at all. Lunchtime comes and goes, the afternoon hours beginning to slip away, too, and all the while, even so much as an opening gambit seems to be entirely beyond her.
‘My God, it’s like a tundra in here!’ Benjamin mumbles at some stage, with a sudden shiver, and she can manage only a weak smile in response.
If she weren’t so distracted, Fia’s sure she would be beside herself by now, wondering how it was possible for Benjamin Lowry to say what he said to her just last night, and then to make small talk with her today. Was he waiting for her to mention it? Maybe, if things were different, she would have mentioned it by now.
As it is, she’s stumbled upon a few other places to put her attention.
‘Hey, Ben?’ she begins, seized with a sudden burst of bravery.
As he looks over at her expectantly, though, she senses herself freeze again. She considers a swift retreat. She could wait for a better time to do this, she thinks; she could wait for a more natural way into the whole subject …
But then, she suspects she would be waiting a very long time.
‘I got your messages,’ she blurts out, dearly hoping this one sentence might be all that’s required. Alas, however, she watches as confusion spreads across his face. ‘… The ones on Facebook?’ she continues uncertainly. ‘From, like … a while back?’
‘Oh.’ He shifts a little in his seat, as realization dawns. ‘That … you can just ignore those,’ he says gruffly.
‘No, but I … what I mean to say is that I just got them. They were in some kind of secondary inbox thing, I think because they didn’t come from a friend, or … anyway, that’s not important. The point is I … well, obviously I would have replied if I’d seen them at the time.’
For a long moment, there is silence. Fia braces herself for disbelief, for confusion, for anger.
But then, at last, he speaks. ‘It’s cool,’ is all he says, and he averts his eyes, suddenly fascinated by his computer screen.
Whatever else this situation is, Fia can sense it is not – not even remotely – cool. By now, she’s spent the better part of the last four hours reading and rereading Benjamin’s messages, as though she might find some new clarity in any specific word choice – in the time stamps, maybe, or the punctuation.
Needless to say, there is nothing. And, on one level, that is probably just as well. It’s destabilizing enough, to find herself on the receiving end of what can only be described as the modern iteration of long-lost letters. For there to be some sort of hidden meaning, a secret code contained within them … that might push her over the edge altogether.
Instead, she’s reached for logic, lined up a list of the things she knows are true:
Shortly after their lives intersected at Camp Birchwood – and more notably in Las Vegas – Benjamin Lowry fell in love.
He tried and failed to contact her via Facebook and appeared convinced that she was deliberately ignoring his messages.
He called her on the phone, too – via a number that, yes, she remembered now, she had changed shortly after she got back to Dublin that September. Her shiny new job gave her a shiny new Blackberry, all texts and calls included, and Fia didn’t see the need to keep paying for her own separate contract, much less lug two devices around with her.
Armed with this information, Fia has some new insight into Benjamin’s weirdness this summer, when it came to any mention of his noncommunication. But then, why was he like that? Why did he not simply confront her right away? Why didn’t he say ‘before you even thought about contacting me, I was doing my damnedest to contact you’? It made absolutely no sense. If there’s one thing she’s absolutely never known Benjamin to do, it is let her off easy.
And, if he was every bit as keen as her to get divorced – seemingly more so – why didn’t he respond when she began to reach out to him? The very first day he arrived here at ZOLA, he outright admitted to having deliberately ignored her attempts at contact. Yet, between his very last message to her and her very first to him, she’d guess there might have been no more than six weeks.
Then, of course, there is the Jessy of it all. Benjamin is not with her now – that much is obvious. But why? Did she find out about Las Vegas – about the wife Benjamin not only acquired but seemed powerless to get shot of – and bail? That’s absolutely what Fia would have advised, were she one of Jessy’s friends back then.
In any case, what Fia knows for sure is that Benjamin loved this person. And he lost her. The thought of that – the guilt of it – makes Fia feel sincerely queasy now.
‘No, but I just … I really want you to know that this wasn’t, like, a “mark as unread” situation, you know?’ she continues disjointedly, looking over at him in the office. ‘This was an actually unr—’
‘Fia,’ he interrupts, the sharpness in his tone unmistakable, ‘I said it’s cool, okay? Whatever. I’m over it.’ He looks pointedly around the office and out to the atrium. ‘I don’t think we need to get into that shit here, do you?’
‘Okay. Do you want to … I don’t know – go for lunch? Or we probably are due a mentor-mentee catch-up anyway, we could go and grab a coffee right n—’
He interrupts her this time with a hollow laugh. ‘Mentor-mentee catch-up! My God, Fia! You really just can’t take no for an answer, can you? I don’t want to talk about this with you,’ he says, enunciating each word deliberately. ‘I’m not in the market for your mentorship here. Is that so impossible to understand?’
Fia feels the question land like an assault. In the time they’ve spent together in this office – and for that matter, out of it – she’s seen Benjamin Lowry sarcastic and frustrated and tired and bored and all kinds of other things … but never quite this – whatever exactly this is.
And the thing is that everyone, when they begin to feel attacked, has some response they reach for right away: counter-aggression, maybe, or silence or humour. Fia’s tendency – she knows this about herself – is towards haughtiness. She can hear that high-and-mighty tone in her own voice when she replies.
‘Well! I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to ask why you didn’t just tell m—’
‘Oh my God, you!’ he explodes, having apparently tipped just past the point of restraint. ‘You, you, you! Sorry – you don’t actually get to be in control on this one, Fia! I can imagine it’s a shock to the system.’
‘What?!’ she fires back, and it seems like this might be the first thought he actually lets her finish. ‘Okay, at what point since you walked into my office unannounced has it seemed like I’ve been in control of anything, Ben? Do you think I wanted any of this?’
Both his eyebrows shoot upwards, and he leans back a little in his chair, as though he’s settling in to queue up Netflix, as if he knows this is the thing that irritates her most of all – when he affects nonchalance.
‘Oh, you want to have that same fight again?’ he asks. ‘Cool, that’s always a fun one.’
For the moment that follows, though, neither of them say anything, tension pulsing between them like a heartbeat. Fia doesn’t know how things have ended up this way – how the conversation seems to have spiralled so swiftly, so completely, out of her control.
‘You know, you’re exactly how you’ve always been?’ he continues then, and it’s almost conversational, the way he says it. Were it not for that slight edge in his voice, she might think he were discussing the weather, the traffic, the price of a flat white these days.
‘And how’s that?’ she asks. A glutton for punishment. ‘How have I always been?’
He seems to cast around a bit, as though desperately searching for the words, as though he is fit to burst, this office suddenly far too small to contain him. ‘… Aggravating!’ he lands on at last. ‘You are the most aggravating person I’ve ever met, Fia. You want to hear me say it? Fine. I never should have come to work at ZOLA. That first morning, I should have fucking hightailed it out of this building the second I saw you and never looked back.’
‘You think?’ she tosses out caustically, but he doesn’t even pause to acknowledge it.
‘So, there we have it,’ he concludes instead. ‘You were right, again. You’re the victim, again. Wow, we got back there fast, didn’t we? Crazy how nothing’s ever really your fault, huh? Nothing’s ever your choice.’
Fia feels the burn of that. Of course she does. She’s a person. But she pushes it down, argues this one like a lawyer. ‘What? I’m confused. Ten seconds ago, I was a controlling psychopath – now I never take responsibility for anything? I don’t know how I can be both?’
‘I don’t know either, Fia, but somehow you fucking manage it!’
‘Well, hey. I thought we’d wait ’til the end of the summer, but if we’re doing feedback now, then you, Benjamin … I don’t even know where I would start with you! You are entitled, you’re flighty, yo—’
‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. You’ve always made it perfectly clear what you think of me – don’t worry,’ he mutters.
Another beat of silence follows, during which Fia’s eyes dart out into the atrium, all too rapidly recalling they might have an audience here. With the door closed, she’s pretty sure they can’t be heard. Through all that glass, though, they can certainly still be observed. Fortunately, nobody appears to be paying them much notice.
‘I’m going to call Susan Followill today,’ Benjamin says then, newly decisive, ‘tell her we’re not doing any more stupid meetings. She can’t make us. Have you sent back your paperwork?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘Of course you have,’ he repeats, with a joyless little laugh. ‘Me too. So, what more is there to say? Susan can send us the marital settlement agreement by email, we’ll approve it by email too, and then she needs to just go ahead and submit everything to the judge. That’s what we’re paying her for.’
Fia lets her eyes widen, as if in naivety, in genuine surprise. ‘But, Benjamin, I didn’t think you were a fan of lawyers who just filled out the forms? I thought you were all about digging down into the mess, exploring it from all angles, you know – dragging it out to serve your own ego?’
He doesn’t take the bait. Oddly, more so than anything else, that’s how she knows: things are really bad here.
‘We’re a special case,’ is all he says, sourly. ‘If I have to go up there and courier those papers to the courthouse myself before we leave for Dublin, I will. I don’t know what in the hell I’ve been thinking with you, this pas—’ He pauses, cuts himself off, takes a breath in and out. ‘Bottom line? A few more weeks, and you and I will never have to see each other again.’
Fia’s eyes narrow. ‘Do you promise?’
If he remembers that old exchange – such a long time ago now, in his little bedroom at Camp Birchwood – no part of him shows it. Instead, he turns away from her. Very clearly, he has decided that they’ve reached the end of this particular conversational road.
Fia snaps her head in the other direction, too, staring briefly at nothing but a blank wall.
By the time she glances back over at Benjamin, a few seconds later, he is clutching his mouse in a death grip, and she has the sense that she could be on fire over here, and still, he wouldn’t so much as look in her direction.
She turns back to her computer, pulling up Alyvia Chestnut’s file.
Perhaps, she thinks, she won’t put this one off until after the weekend. Perhaps – her fingers are already flying across the keyboard, as if of their own accord – she will draft her reply to Jonathan Chestnut right now.
And, suddenly, she is in no mood to pull any punches. If she cannot scream from the rooftops everything she’d currently like to say about her own husband – if, in the spirit of collaboration and non-adversarial resolution, blah blah blah, she cannot even commit those grievances to writing … well. Somebody else’s husband will have to do.