Page 34 of Paradigm

“You finished?” she asked, running her hands over her face to help wake herself up.

“We were mostly there already. I added a few things. I hope you don’t mind. If you do, I can take them out.”

“What?”

“Just a shorter way to build the questions and answers when you’re asking a short-answer question. And you had a way for it to recognize the capital versus small letters, but I shortened it so that it’s more efficient.”

“You did?” she asked, standing up.

“You should have your QE team take a look because it’s been a while since I’ve pulled an all-nighter. I might have missed something. Otherwise, it should be good to go when you need to push this into production.”

“Eline, thank you,” she said.

“No problem.”

“I can’t believe we stayed up all night.”

Arlowe smiled, bending down over Eline’s shoulder to look at the screen.

“We didn’t. I did. And I should probably be going because I have to be at the office by nine.”

“God, I have to work today,” Arlowe grumbled as she stood back up.

“Yeah, me too,” Eline said. “But I can take a nap when I get home or something, so I’ll be okay. What about you?”

“I might try to work from here if I can,” she replied just as there was a knock at the door. “Yeah?” she said.

“Can I come in?” Enya asked through the door.

“Yeah.”

Enya opened the door then and said, “Oh. Hey, Eline. You’re still here?”

“Yes,” Eline replied.

“Nice greeting, Enya,” Arlowe said with a little laugh.

“I just meant that I didn’t expect Eline to be here in the morning.”

“We had an issue that Eline found in the code. She won the bet, but we spent most of the night fixing it. Correction: I spent most of the night. Eline spent all night.”

“You were up coding all night? Arlowe, you know you have a team now. You don’t have to do this all on your own.”

“I wasn’t alone. Eline was here.”

“Very funny.”

“What are you doing back here? I thought you were–” Violet stopped at the now-open door. “Oh, hey.” She looked from Arlowe to Eline. “I wondered who had street-parked in front of the house. I just assumed it was someone who Arlowe had–”

Arlowe glared at her, silently begging her not to finish that sentence because Eline did not need to know about some of Arlowe’s life since they’d last seen one another – at least, not yet, while they were still figuring out whatever was going on between them or what could be going on between them in the future.

“Eline, it’s great to see you again,” Violet said instead.

“Violet, lovely to see you. How have you been?”

“Great. I’m good. I’m here for breakfast.”

“Why?” Arlowe asked.