The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Five
By the time that Fia steps off the subway, after day one of Benjamin’s summer associateship, it’s past 9 p.m. She had a lot of catching up to do, work-wise, in the afternoon, and as the time wore on, she let herself get lost in it. She found herself, on this one occasion, actually almost appreciating the all-consuming, endless nature of it.
Even on ordinary days, Fia is often in the office long after her contracted hours. A certain level of stress has come to feel normal. And there are certainly, she reminds herself at regular intervals, worse ways to earn a living. She’s lucky to have her job. Absolutely no one would have ever predicted she’d end up working on the fifty-eighth floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan – least of all her. There are, after all, a whole lot of lawyers out there in the world. Very early on in her career, she divided them in her own mind into three broad categories:
Firstly, there were those who liked the notion of power and prestige. Often, it turned out that these people’s fathers had also been lawyers – or judges, sometimes.
Then, there were those who had watched Erin Brockovich at a formative age or who had perhaps gone through some horrendous personal ordeal or who had otherwise come to genuinely care a lot about, like, justice.
And, finally, there were the people who had simply been good at school, but in more of a words sort of way than a numbers sort of way. This last group accounted, in Fia’s experience, for a huge proportion of the legal profession, and she had always considered herself very definitely among it.
When she first began as a trainee solicitor at ZOLA’s Dublin branch, there had been nothing much to suggest that she was special, that she might one day find herself parachuted out of there – and to America, at that. Back then, the London office was the carrot. That was the place to which unsatisfied employees might legitimately hope to be transferred or sent on secondment. But to the New York office? The San Francisco office? They were so patently out of reach as not even to be weaponized for purposes of recruitment and retention. It would have been borderline unethical.
And then, on one wholly unremarkable day when Fia was 26 years old, an opportunity arose. Six months, leaving in three days’ time, just to help out on the contentious administration of one huge Manhattan estate. Just – as it eventually turned out – to work almost literally day and night sorting through boxes of documents, while still being paid her Dublin salary. Maybe other people in the Dublin office saw that reality coming. One way or another, it turned out that Fia was in the right spot. Everyone younger than her was deemed ineligible for the transfer on the grounds of inexperience. Most of the people her age or older self-selected out: they had bought a house within commuting distance of Dublin already; they had a child, perhaps, whose nursery school place had been hard won.
In the end, only three other solicitors were both sufficiently qualified for the role in New York and interested in taking it. As luck had it, all three of these people were also total dicks – not even the sort who were commonly liked by their male superiors, but the sort who were disliked wholesale. And so, armed with one single suitcase and the fervent hope it weighed less than twenty kilos, off Fia went.
All that was four years ago now. Somehow or other, once she arrived, Fia had just never left. Six months became a year, and she found an apartment, joined a bunch of social groups in the city, like an overeager fresher. A year became two, and she found a different, better apartment, managed to extract herself from the social groups she couldn’t bear any longer. Along the way, of course, she met George, settled into the sense of belonging that a relationship like that could bring. Eventually, the solidity, the (at least semi-) permanence of the situation began to dawn on her. She kind of seemed to … live here.
More than that, to this day, she really likes living here. Even when she feels depleted, the renewable energy of this city just seems to have a way of filling her up – or at least, most of the time it does.
This evening, she’s bonetired as she climbs back up to ground level at 77th Street station. On the street, busy people whoosh past her; crosswalks and hot-dog vendors and bodegas sprawl out in all directions, but she hardly notices any of it as she makes her way north, then east. She trudges past the ever-present scaffolding, past the forest-green awnings announcing the number of each building, towards home.
This neighbourhood, the Upper East Side, is not generally considered a cool one in which to live. In fact, contrary to what Gossip Girl had very clearly implied in the late noughties, it is generally considered the very opposite of cool. It’s considered boring. There is no black box theatre up here and only a handful of plant-based restaurants, and almost none of the local residents appear to consider dressing for the day to be a form of performance art.
Of course, a person can absolutely still get a trendily baked Brussel sprout if they so choose. There are plenty of good coffee places, and Central Park is close by. It is by no means a wasteland. It’s just that a critical mass of music conservatories and medical establishments have created, overall, a certain impression of sedateness – at least relative to other parts of the city.
This is all fine by Fia. She doesn’t mind that, were she ever seized with the desire to watch a moustachioed man play ping-pong over a craft beer, she would need to hop on the subway to do it. What the Upper East Side provides her, instead, is the ability to afford a very nice, remarkably spacious – albeit shared – apartment, within a short commute of her office.
Approaching said apartment now, Fia squints up at it from the street. Back in Dublin, some of her old friends have been buying houses – not her single friends, obviously, but the ones in couples. With two salaries or parental help, it seems to be just about possible to find a fixer-upper somewhere in the city or close to it. A few people she knows have even moved deep into the countryside, begun intimidating-looking building projects, become experts on the merits and demerits of different types of sinks.
When Fia thinks about that, it’s very hard to look up at her apartment – to think about the small fortune she haemorrhages every month, renting alongside two other people – and feel like it’s the wisest way to spend her money. But then, that’s probably just the day she’s had. Too much self-reflection, she is convinced, can be extremely bad for a person.
Crossing the building’s lobby with a nod to her doorman, she hops in the lift, tries to pull herself together. And when she turns the key in her front door, hearing The Daily podcast on in the background, familiar chatter over the top of it, a wave of genuine gratitude overwhelms her.
By now, she’s been in enough different living situations to know that this is rare: the feeling of walking into her apartment after a bad day and actually being glad to see the other people who happen to be there. Annie and Kavita might not be George – even now, such a long way down the line, Fia still misses George more than she’d ever let on – but finding genuinely, truly good roommates is no small feat. It’s as hard as trying to find a good boss or a good boyfriend. That Fia has ended up with two out of those three boxes ticked is, she reminds herself, really nothing to be sniffed at.
She lets herself flop down on the sofa dramatically, lifting the back of her hand to her brow like a woman in a painting.
On the adjacent chair, her legs slung over the arm of it, Annie exhales a little laugh. ‘Rough day?’
Fia just groans in response. ‘Kav, what are you making over there?’ she calls out, weakly.
From their strip of a kitchen along the back wall, Kavita cranes her neck to look around. ‘Sort of a … risotto, I guess. Or a paella. I just got home myself, so I’m improvising. You want me to toss in some more veggies, stretch it out a little?’
‘Yes please.’
‘I mean, it won’t be, like, super good or anything,’ Kavita clarifies needlessly. At this point, their roles are pretty well established. Annie is the cook of the apartment, Kavita, not so much, but Fia – more practised in ordering and reheating than anything else – always allocates generous points for trying.
‘That’s fine. Anything’s fine – thank you so much.’
‘So, what happened?’ Annie asks absently, one eye still on her phone. And, for a minute, Fia thinks about telling her roommates everything, the whole sorry tale. In the end, though, she finds she just cannot face it. There has been about enough drama for one day, she decides. It’s probably unnecessary to add yet more into the mix. After all, Benjamin won’t even be her husband much longer. Fia plans to start looking for a divorce lawyer this very night.
‘Nothing,’ she mumbles. ‘It was just … you know. Work.’