Page 13 of Derivation

“But when will you be this close to Paris again?”

“You told me yesterday that it’s just a regular city.”

Sarai rolled onto her side to face her.

“Well, I’m there, and you could stay with me and my parents, and I could show you around. We’d have a lot of fun.”

“I don’t know, Gabi. Maybe. Is that okay? A maybe?”

“Yeah, sure,” she replied with a forced smile, feeling a little more disappointed than she’d like to admit.

They hadn’t talked about it again, but Gabi still wondered why Sarai hadn’t taken her up on her offer to visit Paris and have free room and board plus a friend who would take her anywhere she wanted to go in a car with diplomatic plates and the privileges that came along with that. She’d thought about that weekend a lot over the years, but when her life had taken a pretty big, terrible turn, she’d been more focused on recovering from losing her dad at a young age, and then, on completely adjusting her life plan because she and her mom could no longer stay in Paris since it reminded them both of the man they’d lost.

◆◆◆

“Hi. Come on in,” Arlowe said.

“Thanks. I hope this is okay. I know it’s late.”

“Oh, it’s not. We just finished dinner, so it’s perfect timing, and I’m a night owl, anyway. Not a loud one, though,” Arlowe added. “In case you were worried about that.” She motioned for Gabi to come into the house. “I mainly stick to the garage or my bedroom after midnight.”

“You work that late?”

“Engineer,” Arlowe explained, pointing to herself.

“Oh. Me too,” Gabi shared.

“You’re a coder?”

“Well, I prefer hardware, but–”

“You prefer making hardware to coding?” Arlowe asked, seemingly in disbelief.

“Yes. But I wanted a new job, and my friend Chase works where I do now, and they only had a software role.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“MIT.”

“You went to MIT?” Arlowe asked as Sarai walked out into the living room from the hallway.

“Yeah,” she said. “I was in mechanical engineering with a focus on product development, but I couldn’t get a job in it right away, so I’ve been in software for a while now.”

“We should talk about preferred languages sometime,” Arlowe suggested.

“You know multiple languages?” Enya asked, emerging from the kitchen while wiping her hands on a rag.

“I know French and Spanish, but I’m better at French because I lived there until I was twenty.”

“Awesome,” Enya said. “If you move in, we could talk in either of those, and these two wouldn’t have a clue what we were saying to one another.”

“Twenty?” Sarai asked.

“What?”

“You only lived in Paris until you were twenty?”

“Um… Yeah.”