The waiter came and went and came back again and they barely noticed. Just like they barely noticed any of the other things that had happened around them.
Two and a half hours had passed because nobody was watching the time — it wasn't necessarily quick or slow, more a genuine passing. The restaurant had turned over around them twice, other tables filling and emptying while they stayed.
Ryan had told her about the time he'd accidentally deployed broken code to a production server at Meridian on a Friday afternoon and spent the weekend convinced he was going to be fired, only to come in Monday and find that nobody had noticed because the system it affected hadn't been used in eight months.
Zara had told him about a shoot in Tokyo where the photographer spoke no English, she spoke no Japanese, and they'd spent six hours communicating entirely through a translator app and increasingly dramatic hand gestures, and the resulting photos were some of the best she'd ever taken.
