Losing Everything

Chapter 10.14

Lucy got changed, and then sat for a while on Erica’s spare bed. There was a bookshelf across the room, she realized, half behind the room’s door. She hadn’t really noticed it earlier, but she went over and had a look. An idle look, mostly just being nosy, to see what Erica kept there. About half the books were technical manuals or guides to older, outdated programming packages which no-one used any more, and the other half were novels, mostly quite serious looking literary novels.

Lucy was a little surprised. She hadn’t known that Erica liked to read, and especially not to read those kind of books. She was curious, and looked along the shelves for a moment, trying to find something among the novels that looked interesting to her. She hadn’t read in years, not simply for fun rather than trying to learn something for work, under pressure and short of time, but she thought that perhaps she ought to.

It seemed like a good time to try.

She picked a book, and went back outside, and sat on the deck and squinted at the pages in the bright sun.

She read, just read, and it was actually quite nice.

The air smelled of salt, and the breeze was warm, and the deck under her bare feet was smoothly soft like the wooden floor inside.

She read, trying to stay focused, but she kept getting distracted. She kept looking out at the waves, or stopping to watch a bird or an insect or the wind moving the branches in a tree. She seemed to be having trouble concentrating. She wasn’t sure if she was still worrying about everything, without entirely realizing that she was, and that was putting her off, or whether she just didn’t have the right kind of mind to read books like the one she was trying to read. Whatever it was, she didn’t seem to be able to follow more than half a page at a time. She started and stopped and turned pages backwards trying to remember what had just happened, until eventually, impatient with herself, she just gave up.

She put the book down at her side, and just sat instead, looking out to sea. She sat and thought.

After a while she got up and went back inside and said, “Hey, um, sorry to interrupt…”

“It’s fine,” Erica said.

“So I had an idea. It might be a stupid idea, but…”

Erica looked up. “What is it?”

“I could look at code for you,” Lucy said.

“What code?”

“Your code. Any code. Code from your software.”

“Oh,” Erica said. Her fingers went still. She seemed to be concentrating on Lucy now. “Um, how do you mean look at?”

“Like bug-hunt. Or write modules. Or anything, really. Whatever you need me to do.”

Erica sat, and looked at Lucy, and seemed almost embarrassed.

Embarrassed, Lucy thought, and suddenly understood why.

Erica was embarrassed because she was going to say no.