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“I will,” Colby said. She knew she wouldn’t stop thinking about it. The last thing she wanted to do was ride out a hurricane alone in Liz’s house. Had she flooded with Harvey? Colby was pretty sure they hadn’t flooded but seemed to remember that the street did and they lost a car. They might have been stuck for a few days. She really needed to call Liz.
Colby pulled out her phone, but not to make the call. She should wait until after lunch with Debbi. But she hadn’t talked to Napper and had been hoping for a message. It had been an odd radio silence, the first since they started talking on the app two weeks before.
“Huh,” she said. When she tried to open the First Sight app, everything went black.
“What?”
The screen went from black to showing a broken heart. Colby just stared at the screen as words came across: It’s not you, it’s me. She closed the app and opened it again. Same thing. She tried pushing things, but there was nothing clickable on the screen at all.
“Colby, what is it? Are you okay? Did someone die?”
“Nothing like that,” she said, but the feeling in her gut was much more serious than she wanted to let on. Did the app break? What did the cryptic message mean? Had the beta testing period ending?
She knew the message on the screen wasn’t from Napper, but it felt that way. It felt like a breakup. She had no way to contact him now. He was just…gone.
“The app that I’ve been using to talk to that guy is down. Not just down, but, like…weird. I don’t know. I can’t use it.”
Debbi looked at Colby’s phone at the next stop light. “That is weird. It’s like a prank or something, maybe. Can you contact the company?”
Colby sighed. “I guess. I’m not sure where all the paperwork for all this is. I’m sure I’ve got an email somewhere that I can use to ask what’s up.”
“Things have been going well with the guy, then, I guess?”
“Yes. We were going to try and meet somehow before the official time that the app gave us.”
“Why couldn’t you just…meet?”
“The app had restrictions on things you could say. Like, it literally wouldn’t let you send phone numbers or emails.”
“What if the app is totally broken? Like, what if you can’t contact him again? Do you have some other way to reach him?”
Colby tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her gut. She stared again down at the broken heart on the screen. “No, I don’t. This is it. I mean, I can contact the people who asked me to do the beta test if I still have their email. But I don’t know that they could legally give out contact information, you know?”
“I’m really sorry,” Debbi said. “I hope you can figure it out.”
Colby fiddled with the phone in her lap, turning it off and on, trying to shut down and reload the app with the same result. “I hope so too.”
