Page 40 of Paradigm

“She’s where?”

“She lives in this city. She’s about fifteen minutes from me right now, actually.”

“You’re saying that Arlowe, the girl you dated, is there now?”

“We did more than date,” she replied.

“Yes, I know. You loved her very much. Your mother and I remember that well. You hardly left your apartment in months, cried all the time, and stopped showering.”

“That was only a week.”

“Yes, but when your mom stopped by to check on you, she said it smelled like it had been a month, at least.”

She laughed a little and said, “I know. It was pretty bad there for a while.”

“How do you know she lives there?”

“Remember that language app I downloaded to practice English?”

“Yes.”

“Arlowe and her friends, the ones I used to spend time with, built it. It’s their company. I sent an issue to their support team, and I’d found a few already, so I guess they told her about me. She emailed me, apologizing for the issues, and offered me a free month of the app. She signed the email with her name, and I couldn’t believe it, so I decided to look it up. Not only is it her, but her company’s office is here. I told you this city was growing. They’re calling it the next Silicon Valley. Tech companies are appearing everywhere, and I happened to move here.”

“And have you told her that you’re there?”

“I have. I’ve even seen her.”

“You’ve seen Arlowe?”

“I emailed her back. I thought it was fair that she know that it was me, and well…”

“You also wanted to talk to her,” her dad concluded.

“Yes.” She smiled a little. “We’ve spent some time together now.”

“I feel like I should wake your mother for this. She would want to hear this part, Eline.”

“Please don’t. Let her sleep. I can call her when it’s not the middle of the night there.”

“All right. But if she gets upset that you told me and not her first, you have to tell her that I wanted to wake her up for this.”

Eline chuckled and said, “Will do. And it was awkward at first. We had some things that we had to talk about, and we did, but it feels like there’s so much more to say, and we’re less awkward now. We spent a whole night coding something for her app. It was fun and like old times, but we didn’t really talk about much. We should keep talking about what happened, right? It feels like we should, to me.”

“Do you feel like you need to get something off your chest?”

“Not anything specific. Just that so much happened in such a short amount of time, and then we ended and didn’t talk. I feel like we should keep talking about it.”

“Is Arlowe with someone, like you thought she’d be?”

“No,” she replied. “I haven’t directly asked her if she’s seeing someone, but she would’ve told me by now. I was also at her house last night, got to see a couple of those friends from before, and it didn’t come up, so she’s single like me.”

“And are you hoping that you two might get back together?”

“I don’t know. She’s still my Arlowe to me. When I’m in the same room with her, it feels like I should be able to hold her all I want because she’s mine, but she’s not right now.”

“Do you think she feels the same way?”

Eline thought to herself for a moment.