“Well, I sort of didn’t. I emailed several people—two of whom are at UCSF, which is much closer than Boston. But Tom was the only one who answered.” She leaned her head against the seat. It occurred to her for the first time that she was going to have to leave her life for an entire year. Her apartment with Malcolm, her nights spent with Anh. Adam, even. She immediately pushed the thought away, not ready to entertain it. “Why do professors never answer students’ emails, by the way?”

“Because we get approximately two hundred a day, and most of them are iterations of ‘why do I have a C minus?’ ” He was quiet for a moment. “My advice for the future is to have your adviser reach out, instead of doing it yourself.”

She nodded and stored away the information. “I’m glad Harvard worked out, though. It’s going to be amazing. Tom is such a big name, and the amount of work I can do in his lab is limitless. I’ll be running studies twenty-four seven, and if the results are what I think they’ll be, I’ll be able to publish in high-impact journals and probably get a clinical trial started in just a few years.” She felt high on the prospect. “Hey, you and I now have a collaborator in common, on top of being excellent fake-dating partners!” A thought occurred to her. “What is your and Tom’s big grant about, anyway?”

“Cell-based models.”

“Off-lattice?”

He nodded.

“Wow. That’s cool stuff.”

“It’s the most interesting project I’m working on, for sure. Got the grant at the right moment, too.”

“What do you mean?”

He was silent for a beat while he switched lanes. “It’s different from my other grants—mostly genetic stuff. Which is interesting, don’t get me wrong, but after ten years researching the same exact thing, I was in a rut.”

“You mean . . . bored?”

“To death. I briefly considered going into industry.”

Olive gasped. Switching from academia to industry was considered the ultimate betrayal.

“Don’t worry.” Adam smiled. “Tom saved the day. When I told him I wasn’t enjoying research anymore, we brainstormed some new directions, found something we were both enthusiastic about, and wrote the grant.”

Olive felt a sudden surge of gratitude toward Tom. Not only was he going to rescue her project, but he was the reason Adam was still around. The reason she’d gotten the opportunity to know him. “It must be nice to be excited about work again.”

“It is. Academia takes a lot from you and gives back very little. It’s hard to stick around without a good reason to do so.”

She nodded absentmindedly, thinking that the words sounded familiar. Not just the content, but the delivery, too. Not surprising, though: it was exactly what The Guy in the bathroom had told her all those years ago. Academia’s a lot of bucks for very little bang. What matters is whether your reason to be in academia is good enough.

Suddenly, something clicked in her brain.

The deep voice. The blurry dark hair. The crisp, precise way of talking. Could The Guy in the bathroom and Adam be . . .

No. Impossible. The Guy was a student—though, had he explicitly said so? No. No, what he’d said was This is my lab’s bathroom and that he’d been there for six years, and he hadn’t answered when she’d asked about his dissertation timeline, and—

Impossible. Improbable. Inconceivable.

Just like everything else about Adam and Olive.

Oh God. What if they’d really met years ago? He probably didn’t remember, anyway. Surely. Olive had been no one. Still was no one. She thought about asking him, but why? He had no idea that a five-minute conversation with him had been the exact push Olive needed. That she’d thought about him for years.

Olive remembered her last words to him—Maybe I’ll see you next year—and oh, if only she’d known. She felt a surge of something warm and soft in the squishy part of herself that she guarded most carefully. She looked at Adam, and it swelled even larger, even stronger, even hotter.

You, she thought. You. You are just the most—

The worst—

The best—

Olive laughed, shaking her head.

“What?” he asked, puzzled.

“Nothing.” She grinned at him. “Nothing. Hey, you know what? You and I should go get coffee. To celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Everything! Your grant. My year at Harvard. How great our fake dating is going.”

It was probably unfair of her to ask, since they were not due for fake-dating coffee until tomorrow. But the previous Wednesday had lasted just a few short minutes, and since Friday night, there had been about thirty times when Olive had to forcibly remove her phone from her hands to avoid texting him things he couldn’t possibly care about. He didn’t need to know that he was right and the problem with her Western blot had been the antibody. There was no way he’d have answered her if on Saturday at 10:00 p.m., when she’d been dying to know if he was in his office, she had sent that Hey, what are you up to? message that she’d written and deleted twice. And she was glad she’d ended up chickening out of forwarding him that Onion article on sun-safety tips.

It was probably unfair of her to ask, and yet today was a momentous day, and she found herself wanting to celebrate. With him.

He bit the inside of his cheek, looking pensive. “Would it be actual coffee, or chamomile tea?”

“Depends. Will you go all moody on me?”

“I will if you get pumpkin stuff.”

She rolled her eyes. “You have no taste.” Her phone pinged with a reminder. “Oh, we should go to Fluchella, too. Before coffee.”

A vertical line appeared between his brows. “I’m afraid to ask what that is.”

“Fluchella,” Olive repeated, though it was clearly not helpful, judging from how the line bisecting his forehead deepened. “Mass flu vaccination for faculty, staff, and students. At no charge.”

Adam made a face. “It’s called Fluchella?”

“Yep, like the festival. Coachella?”

Adam was clearly not familiar.

“Don’t you get university emails about this stuff? There’ve been at least five.”

“I have a great spam filter.”

Olive frowned. “Does it block Stanford emails, too? Because it shouldn’t. It might end up filtering out important messages from admin and students and—”

Adam arched one eyebrow.

“Oh. Right.”

Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. He doesn’t need to know how much he makes you laugh.

“Well, we should go get our flu shots.”

“I’m good.”

“You got one already?”

“No.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s mandatory for everyone.”

The set of Adam’s shoulders clearly broadcasted that he was, in fact, not everyone. “I never get sick.”

“I doubt it.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“Hey, the flu is more serious than you might think.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It is, especially for people like you.”

“Like me?”

“You know . . . people of a certain age.”

His mouth twitched as he turned into the campus parking lot. “You smart-ass.”

“Come on.” She leaned forward, poking his biceps with her index finger. They had touched so much at this point. In public, and alone, and a mixture of the two. It didn’t feel weird. It felt good and natural, like when Olive was with Anh, or Malcolm. “Let’s go together.”

He didn’t budge, parallel parking in a spot that would have taken Olive about two hours of maneuvering to fit into. “I don’t have time.”

“You just agreed to go get coffee. You must have some time.”

He finished parking in less than a minute and pressed his lips together. Not answering her.

“Why don’t you want to get the shot?” She studied him suspiciously. “Are you some kind of anti-vaxxer?”

Oh, if looks could kill.

“Okay.” She furrowed her brow. “Then why?”

“It’s not worth the hassle.” Was he fidgeting a little? Was he biting the inside of his lip?