Page 58 of Not Your Basic Love Story

“Right.”

“Dev?”

“Yeah?”

I reached my apartment and stopped outside the entrance, looking up at the sky on a rare, clear day. “I love you. I want you to know that.”

His voice cracked. “I love you, too. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Okay. Bye.”

We hung up. A lump was forming in my throat again, but I controlled it. Enough tears had been shed already. Enough time wasted on silly boys and silly emotions. I ran up the stairs to my apartment and spent the rest of the day scrubbing, reorganizing, and clearing my closet of all the stuff that no longer suited me.

At the end of the day, I poured myself a tall glass of cheap wine and was about to turn on the TV but turned to my little turbine project instead. It was a good distraction, and it was starting to give me hope. The 3D CAD program I used was old and clunky, but the math was sound. It should work, theoretically.

I jotted down a few notes based on some research I’d done. One downspout per twenty feet of eavestroughs, so the average home would have six downspouts. Most houses are thirteen feet tall, so that’s seventy-eight feet of my turbines.

Based on how much energy one foot of my turbines could generate, times seventy-eight, multiplied by the average rainfall in Vancouver over the course of one year...

Holy hell.

We could take the whole city off the grid.

I mean, at least through the rainy season. But it was something. Paired with solar panels in the summer? This could make a huge difference. And not only in Vancouver, but other parts of the world that needed clean energy but didn’t have enough sun.

But was it cost-effective enough to work in other parts of the world?

Based on similar projects we'd done at work, I calculated what I figured I might be able to make my turbines for.

It was doable. This could work. Really, the main thing holding the technology back was home batteries. Luckily, that was being worked on. Lithium batteries had come a long way in the last few years.

I looked over the diagrams once more, eyeing them. Then, I opened a few more browser windows.

I’d never filed for a patent before, but luckily there seemed to be several online businesses that could help. Though, did I really want to spend five hundred bucks on it? I chewed on my lip.

Leaving that window open, I navigated to the Government of Canada website. They had a whole page devoted to clean technology advancements. There was a grant available for green energy research and development...

I took another long sip of my wine. Dare I? Ah, what the hell. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. I began filling out the online form.

With the wine catching up to me, and Monday fast approaching, I closed my computer and headed off to bed. It felt like I was actually working towards my goal of doing something better for the world like I’d planned on doing so many years ago when I went to school.

At least I had that to look forward to.

One glimmer of hope in all this mess.

On Wednesday night, I met up with Miranda for dinner to celebrate the wee clump of cells quickly multiplying within her uterus.

“Cheers to you and your incredible fertility!” I said, clinking our non-alcoholic beverages together.

She laughed. “I didn’t think it would happen so fast! I thought that when you got off birth control, it would take months, maybe years to conceive. But apparently, that’s not accurate because two months later, and bam—pregnant.”

“Is that how it happened? Bam!” I giggled.

She shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t as romantic as I’d always pictured it. You know? Like I thought it would have been a super lovey, missionary position, lots of eye contact and petting deal. Nope, we banged on the couch mid-way through a Peaky Blinders episode.”

“I can’t say I blame you. Cillian Murphy is sexy as fuck.”

“Always gets me going, that guy.”

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