She paused. Tom and Adam were both staring at her. Tom was clearly interested, and Adam looked . . . a little weird, to be honest. Impressed, maybe? Nah, impossible.

“Okay. This sounds promising. What’s the next step?”

“Collecting more data. Running more analyses with better equipment to prove that my set of biomarkers is worthy of a clinical trial. But for that I need a larger lab.”

“I see.” He nodded with a thoughtful expression and then leaned back in his chair. “Why pancreatic cancer?”

“It’s one of the most lethal, and we know so little about how—”

“No,” Tom interrupted. “Most third-year Ph.D. students are too busy infighting over the centrifuge to come up with their own line of research. There must be a reason you’re so motivated. Did someone close to you have cancer?”

Olive swallowed before reluctantly answering, “Yes.”

“Who?”

“Tom,” Adam said, a trace of warning in his voice. His knee was still against her thigh. Still warm. And yet, Olive felt her blood turn cold. She really, really didn’t want to say it. And yet she couldn’t ignore the question. She needed Tom’s help.

“My mother.”

Okay. It was out there now. She’d said it, and she could go back to trying not to think about it—

“Did she die?”

A beat. Olive hesitated and then nodded silently, not looking at either of the men at the table. She knew Tom wasn’t trying to be mean—people were curious, after all. But it wasn’t something Olive wanted to discuss. She barely ever talked about it, even with Anh and Malcolm, and she had carefully avoided writing about her experience in her grad school applications, even when everyone had told her it would give her a leg up.

She just . . . She couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

“How old were you—”

“Tom,” Adam interrupted, tone sharp. He set his tea down with more force than necessary. “Stop harassing my girlfriend.” It was less of a warning and more of a threat.

“Right. Yes. I’m an insensitive ass.” Tom smiled, apologetic.

Olive noticed that he was looking at her shoulder. When she followed his gaze, she realized that Adam had placed his arm on the back of her chair. He wasn’t touching her, but there was something . . . protective about his position. He seemed to generate large amounts of heat, which was not at all unwelcome. It helped melt the yucky feeling the conversation with Tom had left behind.

“Then again, so is your boyfriend.” Tom winked at her. “Okay, Olive. Tell you what.” Tom leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I’ve read your paper. And the abstract you submitted to the SBD conference. Are you still planning to go?”

“If it’s accepted.”

“I’m sure it will be. It’s excellent work. But it sounds like your project has progressed since you submitted that, and I need to know more about it. If I decide that you can work in my lab next year, I’ll cover you completely—salary, supplies, equipment, whatever you need. But I need to know where you’re at to make sure that you’re worth investing in.”

Olive felt her heart racing. This sounded promising. Very promising.

“Here’s the deal. I’m going to give you two weeks to write up a report on everything you’ve been doing so far—protocols, findings, challenges. In two weeks, send me the report and I’ll make a decision based on it. Does that sound feasible?”

She grinned, nodding enthusiastically. “Yes!” She could absolutely do that. She’d need to pull the intro from one of her papers, the methods from her lab protocols, the preliminary data from that grant she’d applied for and not won. And she’d have to rerun some of her analyses—just to make sure that the report was absolutely flawless for Tom. It would be lots of work in little time, but who needed sleep? Or bathroom breaks?

“Great. In the meantime I’ll see you around and we can chat more. Adam and I will be joined at the hip for a couple of weeks, since we’re working on that grant we just got. Are you coming to my talk tomorrow?”

Olive had no idea he was giving a talk, let alone when or where, but she said “Of course! Can’t wait!” with the certainty of someone who had installed a countdown widget on her smartphone.

“And I’m staying with Adam, so I’ll see you at his place.”

Oh no. “Um . . .” She risked a glance at Adam, who was unreadable. “Sure. Though we usually meet at my place, so . . .”

“I see. You disapprove of his taxidermy collection, don’t you?” Tom stood with a smirk. “Excuse me. I’ll get some coffee and be right back.”

The second he was gone, Olive instantly turned to Adam. Now that they were alone there were about ten million topics for them to debrief on, but the only thing she could think of was, “Do you really collect taxidermied animals?”

He gave her a scathing look and took his arm away from around her shoulders. She felt cold all of a sudden. Bereft.

“I’m sorry. I had no idea he was your friend, or that you two had a grant together. You do such different research, the possibility didn’t even cross my mind.”

“You did mention that you don’t believe cancer researchers can benefit from collaborating with computational modelists.”

“You—” She noticed the way his mouth was twitching and wondered when exactly they’d gotten on teasing terms. “How do you two know each other?”

“He was a postdoc in my lab, back when I was a Ph.D. student. We’ve kept in touch and collaborated through the years.”

So he must be four or five years older than Adam.

“You went to Harvard, right?”

He nodded, and a terrifying thought occurred to her. “What if he feels obliged to take me on because I’m your fake girlfriend?”

“Tom won’t. He once fired his cousin for breaking a flow cytometer. He’s not exactly tenderhearted.”

Takes one to know one, she thought. “Listen, I’m sorry this is forcing you to lie to your friend. If you want to tell him that this is fake . . .”

Adam shook his head. “If I did, I’d never live it down.”

She let out a laugh. “Yeah, I can see that. And honestly it wouldn’t reflect well on me, either.”

“But, Olive, if you do end up deciding that you want to go to Harvard, I’ll need you to keep it a secret until the end of September.”

She gasped, realizing the implications of his words. “Of course. If people know that I’m leaving, the department chair will never believe that you’re not leaving, too. I hadn’t even thought of it. I promise I won’t tell anyone! Well, except for Malcolm and Anh, but they’re great at keeping secrets, they’d never—”

His eyebrow rose. Olive winced.

“I will make them keep this secret. I swear.”

“I appreciate it.”

She noticed that Tom was on his way back to the table and leaned closer to Adam to quickly whisper, “One more thing. The talk he mentioned, the one he’s giving tomorrow?”

“The one you ‘can’t wait’ for?”

Olive bit the inside of her cheek. “Yes. When and where is it going to be?”

Adam laughed silently just as Tom sat down again. “Don’t worry. I’ll email you the details.”

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Chapter Six