CHAPTER 12
Eline finished what she needed to do for the day, and at six o’clock, she could finally go home.
It felt like she hadn’t slept in years, when, in reality, she’d only stayed up one night.
She used to be able to stay up for hours and sometimes even days on end, catching a couple of hours of sleep while something on her computer ran in the background, and then she’d get up and get to it all over again.
Now, though, she was in her thirties, and those days appeared to be behind her because she’d hardly been able to keep her eyes open through most of the day, and for lunch, she’d gone to the parking lot to try to nap in her car.
She’d gotten about twenty minutes of sleep, which had helped propel her through the rest of the day, but she wasn’t sure what had happened in that two o’clock meeting where she’d agreed to whatever her boss had said, and she hoped that wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass later.
After packing her things, she decided to stop for something to eat on the way home because she was in no condition to cook.
Eline barely felt like she should be driving, but she didn’t live far from the office, and she turned the music up in the car to help her stay focused on the road.
Having grabbed food from a local burger place, she snagged a couple of fries from the bag and thought about home.
She knew she’d get homesick. She had been missing her friends and family more than Holland itself, but these fries were not as good as the ones she could’ve picked up from a stand on her way home from work, and that had her missing the place itself, too.
She ate when she got home, took a shower, which she’d thought would help her sleep better, and considered going to bed, but it was just after seven.
If she fell asleep now, she’d wake up too early and would probably end up in this same mess tomorrow, so she decided to take a chance.
Knowing her father, he’d still be awake, despite it being the middle of the night there.
Her mother would probably be asleep in their bed, but he would be up and in his small office space off the kitchen, working.
Just in case she was wrong, though, Eline figured she’d text before calling, and if he didn’t reply, she’d put something on TV and get a little more work done.
When he had replied shortly after, she dialed his number and put her phone to her ear.
“Hi, Dad,” she greeted in English when he answered with a little grunt. “Going well, I see?”
When she’d first told her parents about the job, they’d insisted on speaking to her only in English for months leading up to her move.
As academics, they seemed to understand that she would need daily practice and real conversation, since the only time she got to use her English outside of that was when tourists asked her for directions, and even then, it had barely happened nowadays because everyone had their phones and could look things up themselves.
“I’m having a problem with a section.”
Her father was a renowned applied mathematician and, for the past ten years, he’d been working at the same university where Eline had once met Arlowe.
Prior to that, he had worked at a different Holland university as well as with the government as a private contractor, but he’d given that up to teach and work on a theorem that he’d been trying to prove for the past twenty years.
Before his government work, though, he’d been working in the US at a think tank of sorts, and he hadn’t enjoyed that much, so when the company had informed him that they wouldn’t be renewing his contract, her parents had packed up and moved back to the Netherlands.
“Aren’t you always?” she teased.
“I suppose so,” he said. “Is everything all right? Should I wake your mother?”
“No, it’s the middle of the night for you. I just wanted to hear a familiar voice.”
“Familiar voice? Missing us already?”
“I’ve been missing you the whole time,” she replied with a little smile. “I know I lived here before, and I like it still, but I just didn’t think it would be this different.”
“Different how?”
“My job is pretty boring, and my boss is not that great. I thought I’d be able to work from home, like I told you, but he’s saying that he’s against that policy now.
I’d have to talk to someone above him just to get to do that.
I like that I have an office there, but you know me – I like to be able to work in my own time and my own space.
I’ve never missed a deadline or had any issue working from home before. ”
“Did you tell your boss that?”
“Not yet. I don’t want to get on his bad side right away. I just started working here. It’s only been two months, and if I do something to make him or even the company mad, they could always terminate me, and I’d lose my visa.”
“They can’t do that if they promised you in your interviews that you could work from home,” her dad remarked.
“I checked the handbook, and it says that it’s at my manager’s discretion. They didn’t tell me that during the interview process, but it’s in the documentation that I had to sign to get the job.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous. If you want to work from home, I think you should talk to your boss and tell him that if there’s any issue with your productivity, you’d work in the office full-time, but as long as you’re doing your job, you should be able to work from anywhere you want.”
Eline sighed and asked, “Did I make a mistake coming here?”
“What? Why would you ask that?”
“I’ve never had a job that was also the reason I could live somewhere.
It was just work before, but now, if I get fired or quit, I lose my visa.
I feel all this extra pressure to be perfect there, and it’s stressful sometimes.
I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I was slower than usual today, and I worried that my boss was looking at me like he was frustrated, and–”
“Eline, all you can do is your best. Focus on the work, and maybe try to get out from under that boss of yours if you can.”
“He’s the VP of engineering. The only person above him is the chief technology officer. He’s fine, from what I can tell, but I’ve only spoken with him once. I don’t think I could be an engineer there and not work for my current boss.”
“Are you really worried?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong. My team hasn’t missed anything big. I think I’m fine. I just feel that pressure that I’ve never felt before, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You keep your head down, and you do your work. If there’s a problem with the boss, you tell the human resources person about it. Make sure to do that before he says anything about you to them.”
“Yeah, okay. I will.”
“Is everything else there all right?” her dad asked. “Are you enjoying things outside of work?”
“I think so. I like it here, but it’s still strange, having to drive everywhere. I miss trains.”
Her dad chuckled and replied, “I remember that about living there. I’ve been getting so much more work done since we moved back home and I could do it from the train.”
“I miss the food, too. I miss you and Mom, of course, and I miss walking around the canals. I think I took it all for granted.”
“We always take things for granted until we don’t have them anymore.”
She swallowed and said, “There’s something else, too.”
“What’s that?”
“Being homesick, I can handle. It comes and goes, and I’ll think about the things that I like about living here, and it’s fine, but something I could not have predicted happened.”
“What?”
“Arlowe is here.”
“Arlowe?”
“My Arlowe,” she said.
“I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” he replied.
“I haven’t said it out loud in a long time, but she’s here.”
“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.
“Yes, she does. I… I can tell.”
“Then, what I would think about is this – if you have something you need to say about what happened before, or if she does, you do that. You get it out however you need to so that you can move forward. But if you feel like you have to keep focusing on or rehashing the past just because you should, you should leave that feeling alone.”
“I should?”
“Eline, if you think you could love Arlowe again, you should try to move forward, not back. It’s fine to reminisce and think about all those good times you two shared, but don’t let anything hold you back from what you want now.
Enjoy each other today, and if she’s the one for you, you go for it.
The only thing I would suggest is to remember that there was a reason that it didn’t work out the first time. ”
“It wasn’t because we didn’t love each other, Dad. It was because it felt… insurmountable.”
“I know. As your father, though, I had to say that. Your mother and I watched you in that pain, and I never want you to have to go through that again.”
“I don’t want to go through that again, either.
There’s something about being young and feeling like you have the whole world on your shoulders that makes finding the woman you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with feel impossible; like it couldn’t be true that it was me for her and her for me and that we’d found each other so soon.
We both had so many things we wanted to do before we found that person for ourselves, and those things happened to be in different countries.
We agreed to breakup because neither of us could see how to make it work. ”
“But you can now?”
“I can see her smile and feel like she hangs the moon for me just like you taught me,” she said, smiling into the phone.
Her father had once told her that he’d known that her mother was the one for him because whenever she smiled at him, it felt like she was hanging the moon just for him, and that Eline should look for that in the person she wanted to be with.
“Well, that is a pretty special thing,” he said.
“She’s pretty special,” Eline replied. “I’ve never stopped loving her. Even when I was with someone else, I… I could never stop loving her.”
“Eline, don’t make things complicated for yourself. Just talk to her. Tell her how you feel. If you can finally be with her, you shouldn’t let anything get in your way this time.”