Page 3 of Paradigm

Her team began discussing how they should have prevented the issue with their current process and how to change it to make sure that something like this didn’t happen again, and Arlowe focused on the conversation the best she could, but for some reason, she also couldn’t stop thinking about the letter which she’d just reread for the millionth time.

CHAPTER 2

To protect her eyes, she wore blue-light-blocking glasses when at her computer and tried to take at least a few minutes per hour to not stare at a screen, so she pulled off the glasses, turned, and looked out of the window of her office. Sometimes, Eline would just sit behind her desk and wonder. She had many things to wonder about in her life at age thirty-four. Would she ever meet someone, fall in love, and get married? Would she have kids? Should she get a pet since she was lonely? Was it the right decision to take this job and move away from her family when that job was partially the cause of her loneliness? Was this company the right one for her? Should she pick up some hobbies now that she was feeling a little more settled? How was she going to make new friends in a new country, where she didn’t know anyone anymore?

She had been in the US and at this job for two months now, but she’d lived here in a different city and state for part of her high school years when her dad had gotten a job opportunity in the States. When he had lost that job, they had moved back to the Netherlands, but her English had been near perfect by then, so when she’d been about to finish university just outside of Amsterdam and met Arlowe Romano, they’d had no trouble with things getting lost in translation.

She often wondered about Arlowe among all of her other thoughts. Every day, Eline thought about the young woman whom she’d met and had fallen so hard for, and she still found herself wondering about what might have happened had they been able to figure it out and make things work between them. She’d pictured several versions of that over the past twelve or so years. They would’ve needed to be long-distance for a while, and trips to see each other would’ve been as often as they could’ve made them, but it would’ve been hard. Money had been tight for both of them, and on top of that, there had been visas and other paperwork to consider for Eline to go to the US, which meant that it would’ve been easier for Arlowe to visit her back in Amsterdam. Arlowe would’ve been working, though, so finding the time to do that, along with the money, would’ve been challenging. With the added issue of different time zones, they would’ve been in for a long-distance relationship, with late-night and early-morning phone and video calls where they would’ve declared how much they missed one another and loved each other and with the possibility of only being able to actually see one another once to twice a year at best.

She could also see Arlowe proposing eventually in their hypothetical future, so they would’ve then needed to figure out where to live and who was going to give up their family, friends, and their life before and make the move. Eline knew that back then, she hadn’t been ready for all of that, so she’d understood why things had had to end between them, but that hadn’t stopped her from being angry for a long time after Arlowe left. She’d been angry for years, in fact, pushing away any possibility of finding someone else, falling in love again, and even making new friends. Anger had been accompanied by sadness, of course, before eventually, the anger had dissipated, and only sadness had remained. The sadness had lessened since, but even after all these years, it was always there.

She supposed moving back to the US now, as a woman in her thirties, had something to do with her thoughts returning to Arlowe and their time together more frequently than they had been before she’d gotten this new job, and Eline still wasn’t even sure if the move across the ocean and to the US was a smart one. She’d had a decent job in the Netherlands. She’d been working her way up slowly but surely, but she’d still only been a QE manager after giving the company ten years and starting as a junior engineer there. She wanted more for herself, and they hadn’t been able to offer her a promotion, which she would’ve needed to even consider trying to buy a home for herself, which had been a goal of hers, too.

So, when she had started looking for a job, she’d been open to all of her options, and she had applied for four jobs outside of the Netherlands. She’d heard back from only one, and it happened to be in the US. She still hadn’t expected to actually get the job, but after several rounds of interviews and the company agreeing to sponsor her H‑1B employee visa, which had been a miracle, she’d managed to get herself a new job. After all that paperwork had been done, she’d picked a start date to be a director of quality engineering for a software company and told her parents that she would be moving.

Wanting to brush up on her English as she hadn’t used it daily since Arlowe had left, she had opted for an app that she’d seen had great reviews, and she’d been using it for a few weeks before she’d had an issue that she’d reported to their support team. It hadn’t been a big deal, but as someone who worked in software, she knew she’d want to know if it were her product. Not long after that, she’d found another issue, and then, another. All of them had been small, nothing that would keep her from using the app in the future or make her ask for a refund for her subscription, but recently, she’d had an issue that had prevented her from moving forward on a game level, so she’d let them know about that, too, planning to continue using the app for more than just her English in part due to the app’s effectiveness.

Now, she stared out her window, not thinking about her job, the team she managed, or anything but the fact that Arlowe Romano lived in the same country. After all these years, as far as Eline knew, they were in the same place. The US was a large country, so them both being in it didn’t exactly qualify as the same place, but she was still closer to Arlowe than she’d been in a dozen years, and there was something to be said about how that made her feel.

Trying not to think about the very few failed relationships that she’d had over the years, she prepared to get back to work by putting back on her computer glasses, but first, she checked her notifications on her phone and saw a new email to her personal account. It was from the learning app, probably letting her know that they had fixed the issue and thanking her for pointing it out. She knew that because she’d received a few of those from their support team before, and they had always fixed the issues, but this one was different. This one had Eline’s heart racing and her mouth going dry when she opened and read the email.

EngineE,

I want to thank you for reporting the issue to our support team. We’ve addressed the concern, and you are now able to move past the question on level seventeen. I wanted to email you myself to thank you for letting us know about the other issues that you’ve experienced as well and give you a one-month subscription credit for any time lost in the app due to those issues. Our team is dedicated to ensuring you have the best experience possible, and we do apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

Arlowe Romano

Head of Engineering

“No…” Eline muttered to herself, unable to believe it, and practically dropped her phone on the desk as she sat back in her chair.

There were other people in the world named Arlowe; probably even several with the same last name. Eline nodded, deciding that there were likely also other Arlowe Romanos who were engineers. It couldn’t be her Arlowe. Still, she chose to do a quick search because that was the easiest way to put the thoughts of it being the woman she’d once known out of her mind. Eline went to the company’s website, but instead of using her login to go to the browser version of the app, she went to the about page to learn more about the company itself, which she hadn’t done when she’d gotten her account because she hadn’t needed to.

One click later, she found the info about the leadership team, and she was face-to-face with not only her Arlowe, but also three other faces that she recognized. Violet was there, along with Enya and Sarai, Arlowe’s friends whom she’d met in her semester abroad program. There was another member of the leadership team named Gabi, and for a moment, Eline couldn’t place her, but then she remembered that Gabi had visited Amsterdam and Sarai one weekend.

None of that really mattered to her right now, though, because for the first time in a very long time, she was looking at Arlowe’s beautiful face. Arlowe’s now-short black hair was slicked back a little, making her gray eyes pop the way Eline had always loved. She’d had longer hair when they’d first met, and Eline had loved running her fingers through it, but this shorter hair suited Arlowe better somehow. Eline had looked at their pictures over the years, the ones they’d taken together, but it had been a while, and she’d never seen Arlowe look like this – all grown-up. She was the head of engineering at a company, which had been her goal even back then, and she had built this company with her friends, it seemed, because they were all listed as co-founders, with the exception of Gabi, who was listed as the head of hardware.

“Of course, they made this,” she said with a little smile, thinking about how Enya had been a genius with languages.

She stared into Arlowe’s eyes and could picture them beneath her and above her like it was yesterday. She could see them when Arlowe had told her that she loved her for the first time, so soon after they’d met, and how they had brightened when Eline had told her the same in return. It was all coming back to her again, which was not a good thing in her estimation, but she couldn’t look away. It had taken someone walking by her office for her attention to be drawn from the picture, but when she realized that it had only been someone on their way to the bathroom down the hall, her eyes flitted back to the computer screen, and that was when she noticed the address of the company’s main office.

Her eyes went wide. She covered her mouth. Arlowe’s office was here. They were in the same damn city. Eline even recognized the street name because she drove by that street on the way to and from her own office. She hadn’t seen any signage indicating that Arlowe’s company was there, but there were several office buildings in the area with multiple companies residing in them, so it could be in any one of those. Eline closed her laptop as if it had offended her somehow and turned to look out her window again.

“How?” she asked no one in particular. “What do I do now?”

So much of her adult life had been spent trying to put her time with Arlowe behind her. She’d tried moving forward and finding someone else who could make her feel the way Arlowe once had, but no woman had ever even come close, and Eline had been silly to think that moving away from her home and trying to start over here would help with that because somehow, she’d not only ended up in the same country as the woman whom she’d once considered to be the love of her life, but she had ended up in the same state, and even worse – the same city.

“Eline?”

She turned in her chair and noticed Dave, her boss and the VP of engineering, standing in her open doorway.

“Yes?”

“Are you coming to the meeting?”

“The meeting?” she asked.