Adam rolled his eyes, and Dr. Benton returned his attention to Olive. He smiled at her, offering his hand. “It’s very nice to meet you. I had written off the whole girlfriend thing as rumors, but I’m glad you . . . exist. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name—I’m terrible at names.”

“I’m Olive.” She shook his hand. He had a nice grip, not too tight and not too soft.

“Which department do you teach, Olive?”

Oh, crap. “Actually, I don’t. Teach, that is.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to assume.” He smiled, apologetic and self-effacing. There was a smooth charm to him. He was young to be a professor, though not as young as Adam. And he was tall, though not as tall as Adam. And he was handsome, though . . . yeah. Not as handsome as Adam.

“What do you do, then? Are you a research fellow?”

“Um, I actually—”

“She’s a student,” Adam said.

Dr. Benton’s eyes widened.

“A graduate student,” Adam clarified. There was a hint of warning in his tone, like he really wanted Dr. Benton to drop the subject.

Dr. Benton, naturally, did not. “Your graduate student?”

Adam frowned. “No, of course she’s not my—”

This was the perfect opening. “Actually, Dr. Benton, I work with Dr. Aslan.” Maybe this meeting was still salvageable. “You probably don’t recognize my name, but we’ve corresponded. We’re supposed to meet today. I’m the student who’s working on the pancreatic cancer biomarkers. The one who asked to come work in your lab for a year.”

Dr. Benton’s eyes widened even more, and he muttered something that sounded a lot like “What the hell?” Then his face stretched into a wide, openmouthed grin. “Adam, you absolute ass. You didn’t even tell me.”

“I didn’t know,” Adam muttered. His gaze was fixed on Olive.

“How could you not know that your girlfriend—”

“I didn’t tell Adam, because I didn’t know you two were friends,” Olive interjected. And then she thought that maybe it wasn’t quite believable. If Olive really were Adam’s girlfriend, he’d have told her about his friends. Since, in a shocking plot twist, he did appear to have at least one.

“That is, I, um . . . never put two and two together, and didn’t know that you were the Tom he always talked about.” There, better. Kind of. “I’m sorry, Dr. Benton. I didn’t mean to—”

“Tom,” he said, grin still in place. His shock seemed to be settling into pleasant surprise. “Please, call me Tom.” His eyes darted between Adam and Olive for a few seconds. Then he said, “Hey, are you free?” He pointed at the coffee shop. “Why don’t we go inside and chat about your project now? No point in waiting until this afternoon.”

She took a sip of her latte to temporize. Was she free? Technically, yes. She would have loved to run to the edge of campus and scream into the void until modern civilization collapsed, but that wasn’t exactly a pressing matter. And she wanted to look as accommodating as possible to Dr. Benton—Tom. Beggars and choosers and all that.

“I’m free.”

“Great. You, Adam?”

Olive froze. And so did Adam, for about a second, before pointing out, “I don’t think I should be present, if you’re about to interview her—”

“Oh, it’s not an interview. Just an informal chat to see if Olive’s and my research match. You’ll want to know if your girlfriend is moving to Boston for a year, right? Come on.” He motioned for them to follow him and then stepped inside the Starbucks.

Olive and Adam exchanged a silent look that somehow managed to speak volumes. It said, What the hell do we do? and How the hell would I know? and This is going to be weird, and No, it’s going to be plain bad. Then Adam sighed, put on a resigned face, and headed inside. Olive followed him, regretting her life choices.

“Aslan’s retiring, huh?” Tom asked after they’d found a secluded table in the back. Olive had no choice but to sit across from him—and on Adam’s left. Like a good “girlfriend,” she supposed. Her “boyfriend,” in the meantime, was sullenly sipping his chamomile tea next to her. I should snap a picture, she reflected. He’d make for an excellent viral meme.

“In the next few years,” Olive confirmed. She loved her adviser, who had always been supportive and encouraging. Since the very beginning she had given Olive the freedom to develop her own research program, which was almost unheard of for Ph.D. students. Having a hands-off mentor was great when it came to pursuing her interests, but . . .

“If Aslan’s retiring soon, she’s not applying for grants anymore—understandable, since she won’t be around long enough to see the projects through—which means that your lab is not exactly flush with cash right now,” Tom summarized perfectly. “Okay, tell me about your project. What’s cool about it?”

“I . . . ,” Olive began—she scrambled to collect her thoughts. “So, it’s—” Another pause. Longer this time, and more painfully awkward. “Um . . .”

This, precisely, was her problem. Olive knew that she was an excellent scientist, that she had the discipline and the critical-thinking skills to produce good work in the lab. Unfortunately succeeding in academia also required the ability to pitch one’s work, sell it to strangers, present it in public, and . . . that was not something she enjoyed or excelled at. It made her feel panicky and judged, as though pinned to a microscope slide, and her ability to produce syntactically coherent sentences invariably leaked out of her brain.

Like right now. Olive felt her cheeks heat and her tongue tie and—

“What kind of question is that?” Adam interjected.

When she glanced at him, he was scowling at Tom, who just shrugged.

“What’s cool about your project?” Adam repeated back.

“Yeah. Cool. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do, and maybe neither does Olive.”

Tom huffed. “Fine, what would you ask?”

Adam turned to Olive. His knee brushed her leg, warm and oddly reassuring through her jeans. “What issues does your project target? Why do you think it’s significant? What gaps in the literature does it fill? What techniques are you using? What challenges do you foresee?”

Tom huffed. “Right, sure. Consider all those long, boring questions asked, Olive.”

She glanced at Adam, finding that he was studying her with a calm, encouraging expression. The way he’d formulated the questions helped her reorganize her thoughts, and realizing that she had answers for each one melted most of her panic. It probably hadn’t been intentional on Adam’s part, but he’d done her a solid.

Olive was reminded of that guy from the bathroom, from years ago. I have no idea if you’re good enough, he’d told her. What matters is whether your reason to be in academia is good enough. He’d said that Olive’s reason was the best one, and therefore, she could do this. She needed to do this.

“Okay,” she started again after a deep breath, gathering what she’d rehearsed the previous night with Malcolm. “Here’s the deal. Pancreatic cancer is very aggressive and deadly. It has very poor prognosis, with only one out of four people alive a year after diagnosis.” Her voice, she thought, sounded less breathy and more self-assured. Good. “The problem is that it’s so hard to detect, we are only able to diagnose it very late in the game. At that point, the cancer has already spread so widely, most treatments can’t do much to counteract it. But if diagnosis were faster—”

“People could get treatment sooner and have a higher chance of survival,” Tom said, nodding a bit impatiently. “Yep, I’m well aware. We already have some screening tools, though. Like imaging.”

She wasn’t surprised he brought it up, since imaging was what Tom’s lab focused on. “Yes, but that’s expensive, time-consuming, and often not useful because of the pancreas’s position. But . . .” She took another deep breath. “I think I have found a set of biomarkers. Not from tissue biopsy—blood biomarkers. Noninvasive, easy to obtain. Cheap. In mice they can detect pancreatic cancer as early as stage one.”