Page 76 of Paradigm

“I don’t think so,” she said.

After locating Violet, who was in her office, Arlowe met all three of her friends in the conference room by her own office, and they all sat down around the table.

“What’s going on?” Violet asked her. “You’re pale, Arlowe.”

“Eline lost her job yesterday,” she revealed.

“What?” Sarai asked.

“They were doing layoffs. I looked it up this morning on that layoffs-in-tech blog that everyone starts to pay attention to once layoffs start to pick up. GoldStash had six hundred employees, three hundred of them being in the US. They now only have two hundred and forty people. The blog said they don’t even know if the company is done firing yet. Obviously, that doesn’t matter to Eline now, but it looks like they’re in some pretty big trouble. Their earnings and subscriptions were already down before the massive email hack, and those numbers aren’t out yet, but they pissed a lot of customers off. I think there could even be lawsuits; I don’t know. It looks like they’ve decided to get ahead of it as much as they could and told Eline that they’re restructuring. Her role was eliminated, even though she’d just got there.”

“Shit…” Sarai said.

“Her H‑1B?” Violet asked, leaning forward, seemingly realizing the problem before Enya and Sarai had.

Arlowe nodded.

“Oh. She’s on a work visa…” Sarai added.

“What happens now?” Enya asked.

“She has sixty days and a short grace period after that, but I know her: she’s not going to want to stay here through the grace period thing. That means she’s got less than two months to find a new job that will sponsor her, or she’ll have to go back, and…” Arlowe swallowed hard. “We just started again. She’s here, and we were working our way back to what we had before, but also making it better because of who we are now, and I could lose her again. I… I just got her back, guys… the woman I’ve loved all along.”

“Please tell me you wouldn’t just end it again if she has to go back, Arlowe,” Sarai said.

“No, I wouldn’t. I’m not a kid who needs to finish college and find a job anymore. I know we can do long-distance now. I just don’t want to. I love her. I have always loved her. And she wants to stay here, not just because of me. I’ll go there to visit as much as I can, but she wants to stay. And even if she didn’t, I’d do the distance thing now. I lost her once. I’m not going through that or putting her through that again.”

“What is she going to do? Or, I guess, what are you both going to do?” Enya asked.

Arlowe turned to Violet.

“Ah,” Violet said.

“It’s the only thing that I can think of,” Arlowe stated.

Violet leaned back and replied, “We’ve never done that before. All of our current employees are US citizens.”

“I know.”

“What’s going on?” Sarai asked.

“She wants us to hire Eline,” Violet answered.

“Oh,” Enya said.

“She needs a new work visa within sixty days, but she’s working with an attorney GoldStash gave her in her severance to maybe extend her current visa. I don’t know if that will work or for how long it could be extended, but we could use that time to hire her ourselves.”

“That process isn’t easy, Arlowe. I mean, it helps that she’s an engineer, and great engineers can be hard to find, but we don’t even have a role for her. I think we’d have to post it online for a particular amount of time and prove that we couldn’t find someone here first. I’d have to look it up, but Cerebral has gone through it before, so I can ask Stella tonight,” Violet said of her girlfriend’s employer. “I know she tried to hire someone from Canada for her sales team, and they didn’t let her do it because it wasn’t specialized enough. They said she should be able to find someone here.”

“I know it might not work and that it could take time, but I’ll take a pay cut myself if I have to. I know this wasn’t something we’d planned. I can’t ask you to use the positions I do have on the radar this year for my girlfriend, but I might be able to figure out how to repurpose one of those. Honestly, our QE has been lacking and could use a direct manager. She wouldn’t be a director, which would save some money.”

“She’d take just a manager role after being a director?” Sarai asked.

“I think she’d take anything to stay here, but it would be her decision, obviously. It wouldn’t have to be forever, but it would get her three years, and she could apply for a green card in that time, or–” Arlowe stopped herself.

“Or?” Enya asked.

“Or, we’d be married by then.”