Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
Tessa
Iopen Seamus and Rosanna's case file for the third time this morning. The words have not rearranged themselves. I knew they wouldn't.
Things are not going well. The building they'd both been fighting for is well on its way to belonging to O'MalleyMart. And now they are separated, which is a shame, because I had been quietly, privately rooting for them.
I sigh.
The notes are clinical and tidy, exactly how I prefer them, and exactly why they feel dishonest right now. I reach for my coffee. It's gone cold for the third time this morning.
I know the ERS protocol for marital distress at this stage by heart: cooling-off period, mediation window, formal annulment review.
I have guided twenty-three couples through this exact sequence.
It has never once felt routine. There is always a moment, somewhere in the paperwork, where the weight of what is being lost presses up through the page like something trying to surface.
I pick up the phone before I've fully decided I'm ready.
Seamus answers on the second ring, and the sound of his voice stops me mid-breath. He sounds hollowed out. I straighten in my chair and let my professional tone settle over me like a coat I know how to wear.
"Seamus. I wanted to speak with you before any formal steps are initiated."
I walk him through it carefully. Rosanna's request for space, what that does and does not mean under the ERS framework, what comes next if clarity isn't established within the window. I keep my voice measured and neutral.
"I don't want an annulment," he says.
Most people at this stage negotiate, qualify, hedge. But Seamus sounds lost. I find myself gripping the pen in my hand a little tighter than necessary.
"I understand," I say, keeping my voice even. "But what matters is whether you both still want the marriage."
There's a pause on the line, and in it I can hear him deciding whether to be honest with me.
"She loved me," he says.
The rawness of it is so unguarded that I have to glance away from my own reflection in the darkened monitor. It isn't a defence or a plea. It's a man clinging to past truth.
My throat tightens. That's unprofessional. I note it privately and move on.
"Seamus." I keep my voice gentle but firm. "We see ERS marriages end for all kinds of reasons. We write in an end date from the beginning. That's the design. I know this is hard to hear, but from a contractual standpoint, your arrangement worked."
I hear him exhale.
The late afternoon light is coming through the blinds at a low angle, cutting thin gold lines across the open case file. I stare at them for a moment rather than at the words, and then I make a decision that is technically outside the strict bounds of my role.
"For what it's worth," I say quietly, "Rosanna sounded deeply hurt when we spoke. That doesn't sound like indifference."
I remind him that space is not finality, that the window is still open, and then I end the call before I say anything else that isn't in the protocol.
I set the phone down and don't pick up my pen again for a long moment.
Seamus's voice is still sitting in my chest somewhere, inconveniently. I think about the way he said she loved me in the past tense, as though he'd already written the ending, and yet with a desperation that suggested he was still hoping.
There was nothing strategic left in him by the end of that call, just something genuinely, messily real.
I have spent several years learning to read the difference between people performing love for an ERS contract and people who have stumbled into the actual thing, and Seamus O'Malley had the unmistakable look of the latter.
I close the file. Open it. Close it again.
My mind drifts back to George. Specifically on the way George looked at me last Tuesday when he thought I wasn't paying attention, like he was trying to work something out and I was the equation.
And then, even more specifically and even less helpfully, on our kiss.
Which was a misunderstanding, I have catalogued it firmly as a misunderstanding, and yet here it is again, refusing to be filed.
I stand up to get more coffee, mostly to give myself something purposeful to do with my body.
The ERS break room is quiet at this hour.
Just me and the hum of the refrigerator, the faint scorched smell of espresso from the machine Marissa insists on using wrong, and a single mug someone has left upside-down on the drying rack at a precarious angle.
I pour a fresh cup and stare into it for a moment.
George didn't choose me. Circumstance chose me on his behalf, and those are not the same thing. I know better than anyone that they are not the same thing. I could write the literature on it with footnotes and an appendix.
I carry the mug back to my desk and sit down. I look back at the case file and think about Seamus realizing too late that what he had was real, and I feel a complicated solidarity with him that I immediately decide not to name.
True love exists.
I am professionally certain of this. I have seen the evidence, facilitated the conditions, watched it take hold in people who weren't even looking for it.
I am also professionally certain that some people don't get that happy ending. Sometimes a fake dating contract is just what it was meant to be. Fake.
I lean back in my chair and let out a breath.
My phone lights up on the desk, and for one traitorous second my pulse does something stupid before I see it's a calendar reminder.
It's not George. I laugh at myself, quietly and without warmth, and pull the next file toward me.
I've always been very good at helping other people get chosen.
I tap my pen against the desk once, twice, and then I stop, because the rhythm sounds too much like something waiting.
Outside the window the city is indifferent, ongoing, and full of people finding their way toward each other. I watch it for just a moment before I look back down at my work.
I'm just not very good at being chosen myself.