The internet can make a person's happiness look complete when all you're seeing is a rectangle of light. Emily's photographs were bright, adventurous, and full of places that made good stories. I had no reason to doubt she enjoyed those experiences, and I didn't resent her for enjoying them. What bothered me was the possibility that she'd become convinced my willingness to plan responsibly had been the obstacle between her and joy.
I kept working. One of my first projects involved improving the reliability of a system that generated recommendations under heavy traffic, and the team was struggling to balance performance with the cost of running it. We argued over designs, tested prototypes, and occasionally had to admit a clever idea didn't survive contact with real data. I liked the honesty of that process: a design either met the requirements or it didn't, and nobody could win a technical debate by accusing somebody else of being insecure.
Noor began giving me more responsibility. She asked me to coordinate across teams and mentor a developer who had the talent to solve complicated problems but occasionally underestimated the importance of documenting decisions. I recognized a younger version of myself in him, eager to prove that the code was enough. We spent afternoons working through systems that would be maintained by people neither of us had met, and I remembered why I'd wanted to become an engineer in the first place.
Outside work, I became more comfortable being a beginner. I took a cycling lesson that seemed ridiculous until I understood how differently traffic flowed around bicycles, and I started riding to the office on dry days. I learned which markets had the best produce and which streets became miserable when the wind came off the water. Slowly, the map of Amsterdam stopped looking like a tourist brochure and began to resemble the map of a place where I actually lived.
I visited Paris on a long weekend with two colleagues. We took the train, walked too far, ate too late, and spent one rainy afternoon sheltering in a cafe where Tomas insisted the pastries were worth every minute of waiting. I took photographs that weren't meant to impress anybody back home. When my parents asked whether I was having fun, I said yes, and I was surprised by how uncomplicated the answer felt.
In the weeks that followed, scattered news about Emily reached me despite my requests. Somebody mentioned that she had taken time off work to travel with Jake. Someone else said she was considering leaving her marketing job because he wanted to expand his travel blog and she could help with branding and partnerships. I wasn't sure how much of that was true, and I tried not to turn gossip into certainty. I knew only that she had always wanted a more adventurous life, and she seemed determined to pursue it now.