Four Addresses and a Second Life

The woman in the red dress caught me checking the date and said that if I wanted to leave, I could use an ordinary excuse. I put the phone down. Her name was Mila, she was twenty-seven, and I had last seen that dress ten years ago. In my other life she had worn it to dinner with a man who spent the entire evening worrying about his employer. Now it was March 2016 again, and the man was still me. I was twenty-six, my name was Sio, and my bank account contained four thousand New Zealand dollars. The impossible part had happened. The expensive part of dinner remained.

Mila designed websites in Wellington. I came from a Tuvaluan family and did small jobs at a digital agency where my boss, Rex, called unpaid overtime an investment in ourselves. By 2026 I had made him comfortable, lost contact with several people I loved and become very good at looking busy in photographs. I had fallen asleep wishing for one proper beginning. Now Mila was waiting for an answer to a question I had missed. I asked her to repeat it. She said she wanted to know what I would do if I stopped making someone else rich. This time I had an answer before the food arrived.

I remembered the growing appetite for independent video channels and addresses people could carry between platforms. Tuvalu's .tv made me think of a little door into that world. I could register a few available generic names at the ordinary price, build original designs and help a creator begin. Mila asked whether I expected the address to produce a show. I said the creator would have to supply that part. She looked relieved. I wanted four good names and four useful beginnings. She said this was already a considerable improvement on my first sentence, which had sounded as if I intended to sell her an entire television station.

Mila listened, then drew a little shop on the paper beside my plate. She said I had described twelve exciting things and one person who might pay. I crossed out eleven things. We would build a simple video landing page, give the buyer their own controls and offer maintenance separately. She would receive thirty percent of a new company for her original design work, equipment and continuing role; I would supply the savings and take seventy. She studied me, smiled and said she had not expected the cheap restaurant to produce a better offer than her last formal meeting. I asked if she meant business. Mila slid her knee against mine and said I could try asking two questions.

Our first buyer was Ana, a twenty-eight-year-old cook who wanted to teach people a few meals she could make well, rather than become an instant celebrity. The four registrations cost four hundred and eighty dollars for their first year. With Mila's design work, paid help, hosting and delivery costs, we spent two thousand five hundred on the first launch and its initial materials. Ana's four-thousand-dollar price included a thousand-dollar deposit; it was part of the price, not another sale. When the balance cleared, the job had left fifteen hundred before wider overhead and tax. Our company cash stood at fifty-five hundred. I looked at the figure until Mila asked whether I intended to propose to the bank application.

Ana invited us to the launch supper. She wore yellow, made the food herself and later caught my hand when I went to carry plates. Ana said I could stop being useful for five minutes and let her look at the man who had persuaded her she could begin. Her fingers rested at my wrist. I noticed her perfume, the warmth of the room and Mila watching us from the other side of the table with an expression that suggested my next difficult task would not involve a browser.

Lina was twenty-five, a nurse who knew my family and had a talent for noticing when I was hiding worry behind an impressive sentence. We met during a family gathering, where she found me outside pretending to enjoy the air while checking whether a payment had arrived. Lina took the phone from my hand, put it face down and asked if the evening had been sold with it. I laughed. She wore blue and sat close enough that I stopped thinking about the account. When she asked what I had missed most, I almost said her. In the old decade I had delayed that answer until it no longer had anywhere to go.

I began with a smaller truth. Tuvalu would sign and ratify the Paris Agreement on 22 April 2016. I wrote the date in an envelope and asked Mila and Lina to keep it without opening it. They exchanged a look that suggested they were willing to humor one unusual man for a few weeks. When the date arrived, both women read the note. Mila asked whether I had more useful things in my pocket. Lina asked whether knowing tomorrow had taught me to listen today. One question made me feel brilliant. The other made me put the phone away.

That night Mila stayed after we finished an early design. She took off her jacket, leaned over the desk to move a line of type and caught me looking at her instead of the screen. She smiled, turned the chair toward herself and said the customer had already approved the page. I asked whether she was approving the distraction. Mila rested a hand against my cheek and kissed me before the answer became another proposal. We left the work where it was. For the first time in years I felt no urgent need to improve the evening by opening another tab.