CHAPTER 2 #2
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.
“It’s ten o’clock.”
“Oh. Right. Yes, I’m on my way.”
“Great. See you there,” he replied and walked off.
Eline placed both of her hands on her desk and took a deep breath.
She had no idea what she was going to do with all the newly discovered information, but first, she had to get through this meeting that she’d forgotten all about the instant she’d seen Arlowe’s name in that email, so she stood and carried her laptop to the meeting room.
She wasn’t all that excited about the meeting itself, and she supposed she’d never been, if she were being honest with herself.
Her job was fine, but it wasn’t what she’d been hoping for.
When she had arrived, she’d been told that, despite her being the head of QE for the engineering team, the VP, her current boss, had a lot of ideas about how that team should run, and he’d been more of a micromanager than Eline had expected.
She did have her own office, which had been an upgrade compared to her former company, but she’d also been told that working from home would be fine when she’d gone through the interview process, and that hadn’t exactly materialized.
Her plan had been to work in the office every day as she got trained up and until she felt comfortable and ready to switch to a hybrid-style schedule and work from home a few days a week, but when she’d asked Dave about doing just that about a month into her time there, he had suggested that she not work from home at all because he believed it set a poor example for her team.
It had turned out that while the company’s policy was that working from home was fine and sometimes preferred, the VP’s own opinion was that people who worked from anywhere other than the office weren’t as productive, which was an important piece of information that he hadn’t shared with her during the several interviews she’d gone through before being offered the role and moving across the world for it.
She didn’t mind working in an office, but she’d planned on being able to work from home as well and had even set up a little office space in her apartment for just that purpose.
If she needed to later, she’d speak with HR about the discrepancy in the company’s policy versus her manager’s, but she didn’t want to rock the boat right after joining the company, so she’d decided to wait and see if it was absolutely necessary.
Eline sat down in a chair and waited for the other engineering leads to gather and take their seats, too, so that the meeting could begin, but then she couldn’t really focus and pay attention to anything that was said in the meeting because all she could think about was the fact that Arlowe had looked amazing in that headshot.
She looked perfect to Eline, outside of her smile because the photo was a professional headshot, so her smile had been a little on the dimmed and forced side, which made sense, but Eline knew how Arlowe could smile so brightly, she could light up the night.
She could picture Arlowe making some sarcastic comment about having to take a professional picture.
Eline could even see Arlowe suggesting they use a photo that she’d taken herself, telling her friends and now-colleagues that it would be just fine and that she hated having to look like one of those people who took professional headshots.
Eline smiled at the thought. Then, that smile fell because it was entirely possible and even probable that the Arlowe she’d known had changed so much that what Eline had just pictured hadn’t happened at all.
Maybe Arlowe liked and no longer laughed at or made sarcastic comments about stuff like that today.
“Eline?”
“Sorry?” she asked when her boss looked her way.
“What do you think?”
“I’m sorry. Can you repeat the question?”