The Last Testament. Sam Bourne

– Maggie decided on a radical change of tack. OK, she thought, we need to move to final status. ‘Brett, what are your red lines?’

      ‘I'm sorry?’

      ‘Your red lines. Those things on which you absolutely, positively will not compromise. Here.’ She tossed over a pad of paper, followed by a pencil, thrown a tad too sharply for Brett's taste. ‘And you too, Kathy. Red lines. Go on. Write them down.’

      Within a few seconds, the two were scratching away with their pencils. Maggie felt as if she was back at school in Dublin: the summer, exam season, the nuns prowling around to check that she wasn't copying her answers off Mairead Breen. Except this time she was one of the nuns. At last, she thought. A moment of peace.

      She looked at this couple in front of her, two people who had once been so in love they had decided to share everything, even to create three new lives. When she had met up with Edward again after, after … everything that had happened, she had dreamed of a similar future for herself. No more war zones, no more anonymous hotel conference rooms, no more twenty-hour days fuelled by coffee and cigarettes. On the wrong side of thirty-five, she would settle down and have a family life. Fifteen years later than the girls she had gone to school with, admittedly, but she would have a family and a life.

      ‘You finished, Brett? What about you, Kathy?’

      ‘There's a lot to get down here.’

      ‘Remember, not everything's a red line. You've got to be selective. All right, Kathy. Give us your three red lines.’

      ‘Three? You kidding?’

      ‘Selective, remember.’

      ‘All right.’ Kathy began chewing the top of her pencil, before she realized it wasn't a pen and pulled it out of her mouth. ‘Child support. My kids have to have financial security.’

      ‘OK.’

      ‘And the house. I have to have the house, so that the kids can have continuity.’

      ‘And one more.’

      ‘Full custody of the children, obviously. I'm having them. There's no shifting on that.’

      ‘For Chrissake, Kathy—’

      ‘Not yet, Brett. First you gotta give me your red lines.’

      ‘We've been over this like a thousand times—’

      ‘Not this way we haven't. I need three.’

      ‘I want the children with me at Thanksgiving, so that they have dinner with my parents. I want that.’

      ‘All right.’

      ‘And spontaneous access. So that I can call up and say, I dunno, “Hey Joey, the Redskins are playing, wanna come?” I need to be able to do that without giving, like, three weeks' notice. Access whenever I want.’

      ‘No way—’

      ‘Kathy, not now. What's number three?’

      ‘I have others—’

      ‘We're doing three.’

      ‘It's the same one I said before. No child support unless Kathy is a full-time mom.’

      ‘Are you sure that's not just saying no to Kathy's first red line? You can't just block hers.’

      ‘OK. I'll put it this way. I'll pay for child support only if I'm getting a five-star service for my money. And that means the kids get looked after by their mom.’

      ‘That is not fair! You're using our kids to blackmail me into giving up my career.’

      And they were off again, back to shouting at each other and ignoring Maggie. Just like old times, she thought to herself with a smile. After all, this was what she was used to. Negotiating a divorce between people who couldn't stand the sight of each other, who were tearing each other's throats out. An image flashed into her mind, which she quickly pushed out.

      But it helped. It gave her an idea, or rather it made her see something she had not realized until that moment.

      ‘OK, Brett and Kathy, I've made a decision. These sessions have become useless. They're a waste of time, yours and mine. We're going to end it here.’ Maggie snapped shut the file on her lap.

      The two people on the couch opposite suddenly turned their attention away from each other and stared at her. She could feel their eyes on her, but she ignored them, busying herself with her papers instead.

      ‘You don't need to worry about the paperwork. I'll get all that to the Virginia authorities tomorrow. You've both got lawyers, haven't you? Course you have. Well, they'll take it from here.’ She stood up, as if to usher them out.

      Brett seemed fixed to the spot; Kathy's mouth hung wide open. At last, Brett forced himself to speak. ‘You can't, you can't do this.’

      ‘Do what, exactly?’ Maggie had her back to him, as she put the file back on the shelf behind her.

      ‘You can't just abandon us!’

      Now Kathy joined in. ‘We need you, Maggie. There is no way we can get through this without you.’

      ‘Oh, don't you worry about that. The lawyers will get it sorted.’ Maggie kept moving around the room, avoiding eye contact. Outside she heard the buzzer go again, and the sound of another person or people moving in and out of the apartment. What was going on?

      ‘They'll kill us,’ said Brett. ‘They'll take all our money and make this whole thing even more of a nightmare than it already is!’

      This was working.

      ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We'll sort this out, we promise. Don't we, Kathy?’

      ‘We do.’

      ‘OK? We're promising. We'll get this done. Right here.’

      ‘I think it's too late for that. We set aside a period of time to resolve everything—’

      ‘Oh, please don't say that, Maggie.’ It was Kathy, now imploring. ‘There's not such a lot of work to do here. You heard those red lines. We're not so far apart.’

      Maggie turned around. ‘I'll give you ten minutes.’

      In fact it took fifteen. But when they left Maggie's office and walked into the sunshine of a Washington September morning, Kathy and Brett George had resolved to share the costs of child support proportionate to their income, Brett paying more because he earned more, Kathy's financial contribution shrinking to zero if she gave up paid work to look after the kids. From now on, he would pay his way even if she carried on working, though she would have a genuine incentive to stay home. The children would live in their own house with their mother, except for alternate weekends and whenever either the kids or their father fancied seeing each other. The rule would be no hard and fast rules. Before they left they hugged Maggie and, to their surprise as much as hers, each other.

      Maggie fell into a chair, allowing herself a small smile of satisfaction. Was this how she would make up for what she had done more than a year ago? Bit by bit, one couple at a time, reducing the amount of pain in the world? The thought was comforting for a moment or two – until she contemplated how long it would take. To balance all the lives lost because of her and that damned, damned mistake, she would be here, in this room, for all eternity. And still it wouldn't be enough.

      She looked at her watch. She should be getting on. Edward would be waiting for her outside, ready to hit the full range of Washington's domestic retail outlets in a bid to equip their not-quite-marital home.

      She opened the door to a surprise. Flicking through one of Maggie's back numbers of Vogue, in the tiny area that served as Maggie's waiting room, was a man who oozed Washington. Like Edward, he had the full DC garb: button-down shirt, blue blazer, loafers, even now, on a Sunday. Maggie didn't recognize him, which didn't mean she hadn't met him. One of the troubles with these Washington men: they all looked the same.

      ‘Hello?