The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Chapter Eight

Around the kitchen table in her apartment, Fia feels as though she has been talking for a very long time. At last, she takes a big breath in and out and shrugs, the sign she’s reached the end of this particular anti-fairy tale.

‘I mean, obviously I contacted him,’ she concludes. ‘Repeatedly. Once the year had passed, I sent emails, I called – the whole shebang. And … nothing.’

‘Oh my God! What an asshole!’ Annie exclaims. ‘I mean, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but that is just … it’s inexcusable. Do you still have the contract? Or, y’know, the leaflet.’

Fia hesitates. ‘Mmm, I don’t know, maybe somewhere,’ she says vaguely.

‘The whole thing is so insane,’ Kavita jumps in. ‘I can’t believe you’ve had to deal with it by yourself all these years.’

This time, Fia says nothing. She’s been not dealing with it more than anything else, if truth be told. That slight twinge inside her – the same jagged twist of guilt and shame that she felt flare up when she first laid eyes on Benjamin – makes itself known again. Her zeal to make contact with him had lasted … she doesn’t remember exactly … somewhere between nine and eighteen months, maybe?

In the years since then, of course she’s thought about renewing her efforts, here and there – but in much the same way as she sometimes thought, for instance, that she should take out income protection insurance or start making some regular charitable donations.

Under her bed in this very apartment, there is a shoe box – and in that box, among various other documents, is a leaflet with a photo of the Grand Canyon on one side and her and Benjamin Lowry’s signatures on the back. Fia, in truth, has always known exactly where that leaflet is. She’s held on to it, carted it across the Atlantic. Keeping the box closed, though, keeping it well out of her own view, never mind anyone else’s … that’s actually proved surprisingly easy. Over the last few years, especially, she’s thought about it only very rarely.

Of course, rarely is not quite never. And on the occasions when the matter has darted, uninvited, into her brain, it has always been such a source of discomfort, on both a practical and an emotional level. For all this time, there has been an item on Fia’s to-do list that has gone undone. Worse than that, there has been lingering feeling that, ultimately, she let Benjamin Lowry walk all over her – let him leave her merrily in his wake, like acceptable collateral damage.

But then, she tells herself, she’s been busy: moving countries, building a career – the months and years seem, in retrospect, to have flown by, just the way old people always said they did. It is little wonder that a single drunken night when she was 22 years old has not always occupied prime real estate inside Fia’s head.

And, really, what more could she actually have done? What she’s just told Annie and Kavita is true. She did email and call and text. Benjamin was the only person she knew who had never got involved with Facebook, so that was a no go. What else was there? Short of hiring a private investigator, she found herself fresh out of options.

She decides – once and for all, right here in this kitchen – to absolve herself of any blame. He was the one who left her high and dry. He was the one who had evidently never planned to clean up the mess that was their marriage unless and until it especially suited him to do so. Fia should at least, now, get to feel a bit sorry for herself. She should at least get to properly bask in her friends’ sympathy.

‘So, what happens next – you just serve him with divorce papers?’ Annie asks. ‘I mean, I guess if there’s an upside to this whole thing, it’s that you definitely know where to find him at this point.’

Fia supposes that’s true.

‘And you know the whole legal process and whatever. That has to help. I guess you can’t do your own divorce, though, right?’

‘No. I’ve been trying to find someone who can handle it,’ Fia says. ‘The thing is, I can’t have this getting out at work – it’s just not a good look, you know? Who wants a lawyer who can’t even keep her own life in order? So, it can’t be anyone I’ve ever been on the other side of on a case or whatever. Equally, obviously, I want it to be someone who isn’t totally incompetent. There’s this one woman I emailed today, actually, who might be good, if she gets back to me.’

‘Well, there you have it,’ Annie replies warmly. ‘This will all be behind you in no time.’

And Fia nods along, but still, she feels glum. Perhaps she looks it, too, because suddenly, Kavita hops up from her seat.

‘I think we should see what Pema says about this whole thing,’ she proclaims, all energy.

Fia frowns in confusion. ‘But it’s not the morning,’ she counters.

On their kitchen windowsill, alongside the dead fern and the washing-up liquid, is a little book. The Pocket Pema Chödrön, it’s called, each page containing a pithy inspirational quote. It was Kavita’s contribution to the household; before Kavita moved in eighteen months ago, Fia had never so much as heard of this particular Buddhist teacher. Now, however, on the occasions that all three roommates overlap in the kitchen in the mornings, sometimes they pause for a little communal intake of wisdom.

‘Okay. Let’s see,’ Kavita says, once she’s back. She is not a Buddhist herself. She isn’t anything. Rather, she simply purchased this book on a celebrity’s recommendation and seemed to consider it akin to a Magic 8 Ball. As ever, she lets it fall open at a random page, and clears her throat.

‘“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know”,’ Kavita reads out, and even as she utters the phrase, her face falls, as though it is clear to her that this, in the situation at hand, does not exactly hit the bull’s-eye.

‘What? No! That’s not what I want! Go again,’ Fia orders.

Her roommate duly repeats the exercise. ‘“Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look”,’ she quotes solemnly.

Fia groans. ‘Eugh. Has she got anything that says “the past is in the past, and it’s completely fine to just ignore it”?’

‘I don’t think that’s really Pema’s vibe, hon,’ Annie replies, with a sympathetic chuckle.

‘No, I suppose not. Anyway, I do feel like shit,’ Fia continues. ‘She’s dead on with that one.’

‘Poor Fi,’ Kavita murmurs.

‘Honestly, I just want to go home,’ Fia continues, and nobody even questions what she means. That’s the thing about a flat-share. Very often, all the people in it have some other place that feels equally, or more so, like home. For Annie, that’s California. For Kavita, it’s Texas. In Fia’s case, of course, it’s Dublin.

‘Well, not long to wait, right?’ Annie says encouragingly.

And that’s true. Every July, lawyers from ZOLA’s four branches come together in one location to look at some PowerPoints, do some team-building activities, and get a bit drunk. The Summer Summit, they call it. This year – extremely fortuitously, as far as Fia is concerned – it is Dublin’s turn. In exactly four weeks from today, she’ll be on a plane.

‘Or, hang on, do the summer associates go on that, too?’ Annie continues.

Fia shakes her head. Of all the nice things about Ireland, suddenly none are as appealing as the simple fact of Benjamin Lowry’s absence.

‘Perfect!’ Kavita says. ‘Something to look forward to is exactly what you need. Not to mention you’ll get to see Hot Irish Guy.’

Fia’s brain is so frazzled that it takes her a second to decode that. ‘Who?’ she asks, before she realizes. ‘Oh! Ryan Sieman.’

She met Ryan at the Summer Summit three years ago – it was held, that year, right here in New York City. Ryan had newly joined the firm’s Dublin branch by that stage, and he was fun – attractive, available, easy company. Since then, no matter the location, none of ZOLA’s annual conferences have ended any other way than with her and Ryan Sieman in a hotel room together, naked. Has she seen him on a few other nights as well, when she’s returned home to Dublin for Christmas and the like? And did they occasionally email back and forth, just the two of them, trading one-liners in response to a company-wide chain? Yes, all of that might be true. One way or another, Ryan can generally be relied upon to provide some welcome escapism.

Now, though, at the thought of him, Fia can manage only a wan smile. She casts her eyes across the spread on the kitchen table: the plastic containers of food are well picked over by this stage, the bottle of wine empty but for a last dribble no one has wanted to claim. She can sense Kavita and Annie following her gaze, can feel the way the entire mood of the evening seems to have flattened.

‘You wanna go out? I feel like we should go out,’ Kavita proclaims then, with every bit of her usual decisiveness.

Surprised, Fia looks down at herself. She’s in her comfy clothes already. ‘Out where?’

‘Wherever. Some kind of alcohol emporium.’

‘I’m down for that,’ Annie chimes in.

But still, Fia hesitates. It’s been a long day, preceded by a very long week, and she still has Friday to endure with Benjamin tomorrow.

‘Oh, come on!’ Kavita says, and then a wicked grin spreads across her face. ‘We could think of it as your belated bachelorette party!’

Even as Fia rolls her eyes, she can’t help but laugh. ‘How is this my life?’ she moans dramatically, but she lets herself be tugged up from the dining table, going along with it as they all get ready to leave. They’ll just walk to Antonio’s around the corner, they decide – have a few casual margs, perhaps fashion an effigy of Benjamin Lowry from tortilla chips and guacamole. Jeans are pulled on in place of tracksuit bottoms, shoes are located, and then they’re out the door.

‘But, so, I really don’t think I get this guy,’ Annie starts, as they make their way down the hall and into the lift. Quite a lot of Annie’s sentences start that way, as though they are all already part of the conversation she’s been having in her own head. ‘Benjamin. Is he, like, a happy, dumb Labrador kind of guy?’

‘Right!’ Kavita jumps in. ‘Or is he, like, a bro?’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Annie continues. ‘Like, just your basic Brad-slash-Chad douchebag?’

‘But, then, there’s this weird, holier-than-thou, “I wouldn’t even consider working a corporate job in Midtown Manhattan, even though I’ve literally chosen to work a corporate job in Midtown Manhattan” thing. Superiority complex?’

‘Or an inferiority complex, and he’s trying to mask it?’

Fia has no answers. Benjamin Lowry could be any of the people her friends have described. She would acknowledge that he probably can’t be all of them, one personality surely having the capacity to contain only a certain amount within it. In any event, though, she doesn’t feel any great need to try to work him out.

‘Whatever which way, he’s going to be right there in front of my face for another nine weeks,’ she replies.

‘Well, hey,’ Kavita says then, as the lift doors open out onto their building’s lobby. ‘Now you have a prime opportunity for a little revenge, right? Okay, he’s a dick, and it’s a bad situation in a lot of ways – I get that. But there’s got to be at least some enjoyment to be had here. You’re finally going to be able to pin him down for a divorce, and in the meantime, you have the power to basically make his life a misery. Can’t you just rope him into doing all the stuff for your clients that you don’t want to do?’

Fia thinks about that one. She can say with some confidence that she’s done a stellar job of aggravating Benjamin this past week – sometimes when she hasn’t even been trying to, and sometimes when she very much has. As far as actually assigning tasks to him, though, actually inviting him further into the weeds of her working life … that seems a bit counterproductive to her. After all, she doesn’t want any more involvement with him than she absolutely needs to have – never mind all the ways in which he might screw things up and leave her with the fallout when he goes.

‘I don’t know,’ she replies dubiously. ‘Not to be a bitch, but I just have no idea how he even got onto the programme at ZOLA in the first place. I mean, obviously his mother is probably pretty well-connected, but even when the firm hires people’s godchildren and whatnot, there’s normally a certain standard. This is a guy who once argued with me for maybe ten full minutes about whether the phrase was “for all intensive purposes”.’

‘Wait, are you saying it’s not?’ Annie asks, and she doesn’t have to wait too long for Fia’s horrified expression. ‘Kidding! I’m kidding!’

She pushes open the building’s main door, all three of them laughing as they head out onto 81st Street, falling easily into step with one another. The smell and the sound of the city is all-encompassing, immediately, but – at least on these Uptown streets – Fia no longer finds it overwhelming. She actually finds it comforting, familiar – like a cocoon.

‘And you said he’s been doing what since undergrad?’ Kavita continues. ‘Being a gamer?’

Maybe that’s not exactly factual, and Fia couldn’t say for certain that the inaccuracy originates with her roommate. Nonetheless, she finds herself disinclined to issue a correction right now.

‘Something like that,’ she says. ‘Whatever it was, it doesn’t seem to have left him too keen to exert himself, anyway. Waltzes in at nine every morning, doesn’t stay a second after five thirty.’

‘Right. If you ask me, you should basically go full Miranda Priestly on his ass. If you don’t trust him with anything significant, then just give him a ton of really annoying, menial tasks. This moron’s not going to know what’s hit him.’

Fia just laughs, feeling suddenly glad that they decided to come on this little jaunt tonight. It’s good for a person, she thinks, the way that New York City seems to make it impossible to stew, to stagnate, for too long.

‘Well, I’ll bear it in mind,’ she replies merrily. Perhaps, now that she thinks about it, she does have some admin that needs to be completed on a fairly urgent basis. Perhaps there are some ancient boxes of trust deeds that simply aren’t going to sort themselves. And – she finds ever more enthusiasm building inside her – there’s just something about a shop-bought coffee, isn’t there? Even the fancy aluminium machines at ZOLA don’t seem to quite hit the spot in the same way as that place down on Madison and 44th. In short, there are bound to be all sorts of ways she can fill Benjamin’s day – tasks with which she can occupy and exhaust him, while still staying well within the limits of his intellectual capabilities.

The very next day, in the break room, one of the paralegals tells Fia that Benjamin Lowry is currently third in his class at Columbia Law.

She just about chokes on her mini muffin.