AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It didn’t matter. I was strong, and I was going to get through this. Obstacles were only there for me to prove just how much I wanted this baby, and a little morning fatigue wasn’t about to be the thing that broke me.
So I jumped in a cold shower, gritting my teeth before giving in and turning the heat up just a little bit. On my way to work, I contemplated stopping for a cup of coffee, but remembered the baby. Caffeine wasn’t good for the baby. The experts recommended no more than two cups per day, but I was an overachiever, so I was going to get by with zero. If there was any chance of something harming my baby at all, I would go without. It was only a few months of my life — it could affect their life for its entirety.
Maybe that’s why I was in a grumpy mood when I finally made it into the office (only fifteen minutes late, which I considered a victory, not that anybody noticed either way). After starting up my computer, logging in, and checking my email, Cheryl came by my desk.
“Uh, Mila,” she said, her voice a tad frustrated. “We need to talk to you.”
I looked up at her and had to bite my tongue to keep it from saying, “Don’t waste my time.” Instead, I asked, “What is it?”
“Can we get a conference room? I think it’s better to just show you.”
“Yeah, just a second.” I logged into the system and reserved one of the rooms for an hour. “Conference room three is available. Let’s go.”
Cheryl looked across the office to Erik and gestured towards the room. Erik nodded and grabbed his laptop.
When he plugged it in inside the conference room, he began. “This is my mistake,” he said. “I incorrectly implemented the Markov chain and didn’t account for or log a potential memory leak.”
I sighed. “English, Erik.”
“He did a fuck up,” Cheryl said, unexpectedly curt for her.
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“I didn’t exactly get the algorithm implemented perfectly,” Erik said.
“That’s an understatement,” Cheryl said. “He effectively programmed a random number generator.”
“So all the previous results of the matchmaker algorithm were invalid?” I asked. There was a sense of hope in my mind. Deep down, I had believed that Leo and I might have been fighting an uphill battle in our relationship and we were doomed to fail. But maybe that wasn’t the case.
“Great, can we fix it?”
“We reverted the changes, and I should be able to implement the improvements and get it into code review by E-O-D.”
EOD: End of day. Or that’s what it stood for. In practice, I learned to never trust a deadline.
“Actual EOD,” I asked, “or should I not quite hold my breath yet?”
Cheryl glared at Erik and then back at me. “I’ll take care of it. The change will be in QA before 5 pm, or I owe you a beer.”
I looked at Erik. “Witness?”
“Witness,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “Let me know when it’s ready for me to look at.”
I tried to sound disinterested in the whole ordeal, but the fact was I had a vested interest in the changes, and I wanted Cheryl to write the code ASAP so I could see what the real results would be for Leo and I. There was something so appealing about an easy and definite answer about our future. It’s why people went to psychics or checked their star charts: no matter how logical and scientific we tried to be, there was a part of all of us that still believed in destiny. With the old algorithm spitting out that my compatibility with Leo was a near impossibility, it made it easier to let him leave my life. But if we were a genuine fit? That could be a different story. Maybe I was making a mistake.
The hours of the day went by slowly while my mind went every which way. After all, I had vowed to myself that I was done with Leo and didn’t want him in my life anymore. I’d put my foot down, and I was a stubborn enough person to never consider lifting that foot again in almost any other context. But I had a weak spot for Leo. And, no matter what happened and what I chose to do, I know I was at risk of someday looking back with endless regret, wondering what would have happened if I’d opted to go the other way.
Throughout the day, I would look over at Cheryl working at her standing desk, typing away and tapping her feet in between lines of code. Eventually, she came over to me.
“Mila,” she said, “it’s done.”
“Sorry?” I asked. I was in an end-of-day daze, exacerbated by the lack of caffeine in my system.
“I made the changes and updated the algorithm,” she told me.
That gave me all the energy I was missing from my caffeine deprivation, though I made a point of bottling it up. Nobody in the office knew about Leo, nor did I want them to. The last thing I needed was to be outed as a closet romantic.
