The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Chapter Forty-One

Across the conference room table from Alyvia, Fia cannot believe it has only been five weeks since they all were last here together. So much seems to have changed in the interim – at least, on her and Benjamin’s side of the desk. His sheer proximity still creates a supercharged awareness on her part, but in a very different way from before.

Meanwhile, on Alyvia’s side – with her son still waiting in reception – things appear to be much as they were. Again, she comes armed with reams of screenshots of the recent Instagram activity from Silverfish29. He continues to repost all of Alyvia’s content, each time with his own caption added, and, truthfully, this is not news to Fia. She’s been keeping tabs. Nevertheless, she goes through the motions of reviewing some of the first few highlighted captions:

When will u learn that nobody cares about these stupid pictures

Lol lol not your real house though, not your kid’s real clothes …

This is litrally child abuse.

Silverfish29’s spelling, evidently, hasn’t much improved. The allegations, too, remain much as they ever have been – just variations on the same themes, with no particular escalation. Oddly, the more ferocious feedback appears now to be coming from perfect strangers. Under both the troll account’s posts, and Alyvia’s original ones, the comments come thick and fast:

ALL of Alyvia Chestnut’s sponsors need to IMMEDIATELY STOP bankrolling this MONEY-GRABBING WHORE

I’m not going to lie, I used to really like you, Alyvia, but this is becoming pathetic. Give it up, girl. Silverfish29 slipped that mask right off you, and there ain’t no putting it back on.

Guys, I am actually seriously worried about Gus at this point, does anyone have a connection to the family? Where in New York are they living? I think it’s time child services got involved. PM me if you know their address.

Fia winces, passing the pages over to Benjamin. He, too, gives them a brief glance, before looking back up at Alyvia.

‘Well, we’d love to go ahead and bring Gus in,’ he tells her, swift as ever in getting to the point. ‘Like I said on the phone, if this case does progress, there’s a possibility he might ultimately have to give evidence. So, it’s important we get a sense of how robust a witness he’s likely to make.’

This, Fia has to admit, is good. So much better than I wanted to get a gander at him, make sure none of the things in these allegations are actually true.

‘And it’s probably good for Gus to start getting comfortable with us, too,’ Benjamin continues. ‘Or, well, I guess I’ll actually be finishing up at ZOLA in a few weeks, but getting comfortable with Fia.’

He glances over at Fia, and she wonders when she started to kind of love the sound of her own name coming out of Benjamin’s mouth.

A slight wave of heat comes over her, just thinking about the position they were in together not twenty minutes ago. She has got to find some way to get Kavita and Annie out of her apartment – soon – for the purpose of getting Benjamin into it. Failing that, she’d tolerate some sort of encounter with his roommate. She’d prefer to be overheard by a stranger than her own two friends. Hell, she’d almost pay to rent a hotel room at this point. But somehow, some way, she needs to be alone with Benjamin Lowry. That just feels like what’s required here, before she can even begin to think about her exit strategy.

She reaches for a glass of water, feeling his eyes on her now, as if he knows exactly what’s running through her mind.

Across the table, meanwhile, Alyvia just looks worried. ‘Okay. I haven’t told Gus anything about the trolling so far, though. And, needless to say, I haven’t told him it’s his fucking father. So, if you could just …’

‘Absolutely,’ Fia replies smoothly, before the obvious question occurs to her. ‘Why does he think he’s here, though?’

‘Oh, he thinks it’s just a business meeting. Gussy tags along with me on those all the time – welcome to single parenthood, am I right?’

Not being a parent, single or otherwise, Fia has nothing much to say to this, so she simply smiles. And one quick phone call later, someone is escorting Gus into the conference room. The boy sits down beside his mother.

The first thing Fia notices is that he’s not in the blazer and bow tie of so many of his photographs. There’s no corduroy anywhere in sight. Instead, he’s dressed in jeans and a hoodie. With these, he’s wearing Converse and a T-shirt showing a seventies rock band that Fia imagines he’s lately begun to like more in notion than in sound. In short, he looks much more like the average American preteen than he seems on Instagram.

In other ways, though, Gus doesn’t seem at all like a preteen. Conversationally, he’s 11 going on 25. Only child syndrome, Fia guesses, noticing how he seems to know exactly when and how to speak up, where to listen politely. Even as Alyvia drones on about algorithms and optimization and engagement, he manages to appear reasonably attentive.

Overall, it takes less than fifteen minutes for Fia’s mind to be put entirely at rest. She’s no expert, of course, but she’s pretty sure she would know an abused child, or even a troubled child, if one happened to turn up in ZOLA’s conference room in front of her.

Very evidently, Gus falls into neither category. And Alyvia, for all her possible and probable faults, clearly adores this kid: it’s in the affection of her body language, her tone of voice with and about him.

‘So, is it fun doing the posts?’ Benjamin asks Gus eventually, having – quite masterfully, actually – engineered the conversation so that this seems a natural question.

Gus shrugs. ‘Sure.’

‘How ’bout your friends at school,’ Benjamin continues. ‘Do they think it’s pretty cool, too?’

At this, Gus hesitates slightly. ‘Mmm, some of ’em can be kind of annoying sometimes. But I guess that’s okay. You can’t please everyone all the time, right?’

Beside him, Alyvia beams. ‘That’s right,’ she says sagely. ‘That’s exactly what I always tell him.’

Benjamin seems to take this in. There’s a slight suspension in the conversation for a minute, before he turns to smile at Gus, too. ‘Well, that’s a very mature attitude, dude. Took me at least ’til I was in my mid-20s to figure that one out. And you’re, what, 11 years old?’

‘Almost 12,’ Gus replies.

‘Oh, cool. When’s your birthday?’

Fia barely registers the child’s response though. She’s long since seen, and heard, all she needs to here.

Once Alyvia and Gus are on their way, Fia and Benjamin take the lift back up to the fifty-eighth floor.

‘Well?’ she asks him, once the doors are closed. ‘You satisfied?’

Benjamin’s staring into space a little. ‘Hmm? Oh. Yeah. I guess so.’

He’s quiet for the whole remainder of the morning, though.

It’s only after lunch, when they’re both in their little office – Benjamin readying himself for some big conference upstairs with the M&A team – that Fia gets any hint as to why.

‘So, I think I know who’s posting all the shit on Instagram about Alyvia,’ he offers as he stands, sliding his arms into his jacket.

Fia snaps to attention. By now, she’s dealt with so many other matters that it takes her a second to refocus her mind accordingly.

‘Oh my God! Did Instagram respond to the subpoena already?’ she asks. ‘Do we have an IP address for Silverfish?’

‘No.’

‘So, what, then?’

Benjamin tips his head back, rotating his neck in a circular motion, in the same way that he’s done a zillion times since he arrived at the firm and that has now become inexplicably extra-attractive to Fia. There seem to be a lot of things like that. For the moment, she does her best to ignore it.

‘I think it’s Gus,’ he says.

Fia practically does a comedy double-take. ‘Gus, as in the kid?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How’d you figure that?’

‘I don’t know. Just … look around,’ Benjamin says, and then he does exactly that, letting his gaze drift out into the atrium before landing back on Fia. ‘This place isn’t exactly a kid’s idea of a perfect morning, okay? And with 90 per cent of kids, you’re gonna very much know that. They’re gonna act out, ask for the iPad – or be on their phones, I guess. At the very least they’re gonna look bored. But Gus was just so … pleasing.’

Fia lets out a little laugh. ‘And you think that’s a problem?’

‘I kinda do, yeah.’

‘So, he’s polite,’ she counters. ‘He’s comfortable around adults. I don’t think we can hold that against him.’

Benjamin shakes his head, unconvinced. ‘Nah. He was, like, too polite. Didn’t you think so?’

For no particular reason other than that he’s planted the seed, Fia begins to doubt herself. ‘I don’t know. Maybe?’

Benjamin flicks through his armful of documents, checking to make sure he has everything for his meeting. ‘Just, ask Alyvia, will you?’

‘Ask her if she’s in cahoots with her kid to basically frame her estranged-husband?’

‘What? No. I don’t think Alyvia knows this,’ he clarifies. ‘Just ask her if there’s … any possibility it could be Gus.’

Fia exhales an incredulous little laugh. ‘How ’bout you ask her?’

‘Well, I couldn’t possibly do that,’ he replies, not missing a beat. ‘I’m just the summer associate.’

There’s a smile tugging at his lips, and it makes her want to kiss it off him.

‘I’m not saying call her up and accuse Gus,’ he continues. ‘Just say … I don’t know – say that you think it’s important he knows what’s going on and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to broach the subject with him, ask him if he has any idea as to who it might be, yadda yadda …’

‘We’re talking about the same child, right?’ Fia asks again, though it’s mostly rhetorical at this point. And, when Benjamin offers no response, his expression still unmoved, she sighs aloud. ‘Fine,’ she agrees. ‘But I’m only doing this for you.’

He makes a huge show of being touched, veritably bowled overby her declaration. She rolls her eyes.

‘Because I respect you as a professional,’ she clarifies, with a little bit of a smirk.

He smirks, too. ‘Wow. That’s big talk, Irish. This meeting is probably going to go long, and then I have a ton of other shit to do for Brett upstairs. I might be done by about seven thirty. Will you still be around by then?’

‘I could be,’ she replies.

‘See you on the roof?’ he asks quietly.

She gives him a little nod. ‘Cool,’ she says, and the thing is that nobody can hear them in here – there’s no need for their discretion. It feels sort of nice, though, all the same: just, the intimacy of it.