Page 55 of Paradigm

“Me too,” Arlowe said.

“You too what?” she asked with a little laugh.

“I still want what I wanted then – I want to get married and figure out the kids part.”

“You never met a woman you wanted to do that stuff with?”

“No, I did. She just lived in Amsterdam, and I lived here,” Arlowe replied. “Other than her, though, no.”

“I have your entrées for you,” their waiter said, which gave them both a moment to breathe in what had turned out to be a pretty big conversation.

CHAPTER 17

Arlowe was laughing louder than she had in a very long time, and she was doing so in a public place, which meant that a few of the restaurant patrons were looking over at her like she was ruining their quiet night out. She understood, so she quieted down, but these people had no idea what she was going through. She was having dinner with the woman whom she’d always thought of as the one who had gotten away, and they were talking about a user experience competition in which the winner was chosen based on creating the worst experience on the internet. Eline had participated in that one year and had come in fourth place, winning a little money for her efforts.

“So, every time they clicked in the box and filled something out, instead of it going down to the next field, it went back up to the previous field. It would delete any numbers, but not letters, and your password had to be entirely special characters, no letters or numbers,” Eline said.

Arlowe laughed again but tried to lower her volume this time.

“What did the winner do?” she asked as she signed the credit card receipt for their meal.

“You had to enter your phone number using a sliding scale for each number and adding the number prior to it every time.”

“What?” Arlowe laughed again.

“And you had to start with the country code and area code, so if you were in the US, you’d scale to one and probably think this wasn’t too bad. The next scale, you’d have to scale to one and then, let’s say, three or something for your area code. Then, it’s one, three, five, or whatever your next number was, and you had to keep going until you’d entered the whole number on all the scales. The best part was that if you hit enter, it would open a dialogue box and ask you to verify it, and then another scale would appear, and you had to do it all over again.” Eline chuckled.

Arlowe shook her head, and her eyes ended up on the lake to her left, giving her an idea.

“Hey, do you maybe want to walk around the water for a bit? It really is a nice night.”

“Yeah, that sounds great,” Eline replied.

“I’m sure the people at the nearby tables can’t wait for me to leave. I haven’t laughed like this in a long time,” she confessed.

Then, she stood and looked around for a gate or opening in the short barrier between the restaurant and the path around the water. She nodded when she found it back behind Eline, and Eline stood up and looked in that direction.

“Shall we?” Eline asked.

Arlowe met her at the gate, pushed it open, and let Eline go first. They made it to the main path, and Arlowe wanted to reach for Eline’s hand, but she tucked her own into the front pockets of her jeans instead, trying to keep in mind that tonight wasn’t a date. They joined a few other people on the path, but it was mostly empty, which she liked because she felt like she could use a break from the busy world around her, and with the offices around them mostly empty, there was a quiet calm over the night that she appreciated.

“So, have you been here before?” Eline asked.

“No,” she said. “I hadn’t even heard of the restaurant before I was trying to figure out where to go tonight. It’s kind of tucked in off the road, so it’s very easy to miss. I liked it, though.”

“Me too.”

“And I like this,” Arlowe said. “Did you know that this lake wasn’t even here five years ago?”

“I know it’s manmade.”

“Yeah, Sweeney-Maddox built that giant build­ing over there right before COVID hit.” Arlowe shook her head. “Bad luck for them, huh?”

“What happened?”

“They’re still around, but they’ve been mostly remote, so they lease out floors and offices since they didn’t end up needing all that space. They started building this lake around the same time. Well, digging it out, technically. They weren’t going to finish it when the pandemic hit and everyone started working from home, but the city told them that they had to because they’d bought the land and had it coded, or whatever you do for something like this, as a water feature, I guess. I don’t know. Violet was the one who told me about it. She said the city told them that they had to finish it or fill it back in and make it so that someone could build something else on top of it. It was more expensive to do that than to put the lake in, so they did that. Now, it’s this kind-of-cool place that we can walk around.”

“Well, I’m glad they did it, then,” Eline replied.