“When I was in my third year of grad school,” he said quietly, “my adviser sent me to give a faculty symposium in his stead. He told me only two days before, without any slides or a script. Just the title of the talk.”

“Wow.” Olive tried to imagine what that would have felt like, being expected to perform something so daunting with so little forewarning. At the same time, part of her marveled at Adam self-disclosing something without being asked a direct question. “Why did he do that?”

“Who knows?” He tilted his head back, staring at a spot above her head. His tone held a trace of bitterness. “Because he had an emergency. Because he thought it’d be a formative experience. Because he could.”

Olive just bet that he could. She didn’t know Adam’s former adviser, but academia was very much an old boys’ club, where those who held the power liked to take advantage of those who didn’t without repercussions.

“Was it? A formative experience?”

He shrugged again. “As much as anything that keeps you awake in a panic for forty-eight hours straight can be.”

Olive smiled. “And how did you do?”

“I did . . .” He pressed his lips together. “Not well enough.” He was silent for a long moment, his gaze locked somewhere outside the café’s window. “Then again, nothing was ever good enough.”

It seemed impossible that someone might look at Adam’s scientific accomplishments and find them lacking. That he could ever be anything less than the best at what he did. Was that why he was so severe in his judgment of others? Because he’d been taught to set the same impossible standards for himself?

“Do you still keep in touch with him? Your adviser, I mean.”

“He’s retired now. Tom has taken over what used to be his lab.”

It was such an uncharacteristically opaque, carefully worded answer. Olive couldn’t help being curious. “Did you like him?”

“It’s complicated.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, looking pensive and far away. “No. No, I didn’t like him. I still don’t. He was . . .” It took him so long to continue, she almost convinced herself that he wouldn’t. But he did, staring at the late-afternoon sunlight disappearing behind the oak trees. “Brutal. My adviser was brutal.”

She chuckled, and Adam’s eyes darted back to her face, narrow with confusion.

“Sorry.” She was still laughing a little. “It’s just funny, to hear you complain about your old mentor. Because . . .”

“Because?”

“Because he sounds exactly like you.”

“I’m not like him,” he retorted, more sharply than Olive had come to expect from him. It made her snort.

“Adam, I’m pretty sure that if we were to ask anyone to describe you with one word, ‘brutal’ would come up one or ten times.”

She saw him stiffen before she was even done speaking, the line of his shoulders suddenly tense and rigid, his jaw tight and with a slight twitch to it. Her first instinct was to apologize, but she was not sure for what. There was nothing new to what she’d just told him—they’d discussed his blunt, uncompromising mentoring style before, and he’d always taken it in stride. Owned it, even. And yet his fists were clenched on the table, and his eyes were darker than usual.

“I . . . Adam, did I—” she stammered, but he interrupted her before she could continue.

“Everyone has issues with their advisers,” he said, and there was a finality to his tone that warned her not to finish her sentence. Not to ask What happened? Where did you just go?

So she swallowed and nodded. “Dr. Aslan is . . .” She hesitated. His knuckles were not quite as white anymore, and the tension in his muscles was slowly dissolving. It was possible that she’d imagined it. Yes, she must have. “She’s great. But sometimes I feel like she doesn’t really understand that I need more . . .” Guidance. Support. Some practical advice, instead of blind encouragement. “I’m not even sure what I need, myself. I think that might be part of the problem—I’m not very good at communicating it.”

He nodded and appeared to choose his words carefully. “It’s hard, mentoring. No one teaches you how to do it. We’re trained to become scientists, but as professors, we’re also in charge of making sure that students learn to produce rigorous science. I hold my grads accountable, and I set high standards for them. They’re scared of me, and that’s fine. The stakes are high, and if being scared means that they’re taking their training seriously, then I’m okay with it.”

She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“My job is to make sure that my adult graduate students don’t become mediocre scientists. That means I’m the one who’s tasked with demanding that they rerun their experiments or adjust their hypotheses. It comes with the territory.”

Olive had never been a people pleaser, but Adam’s attitude toward others’ perception of him was so cavalier, it was almost fascinating. “Do you really not care?” she asked, curious. “That your grads might dislike you as a person?”

“Nah. I don’t like them very much, either.” She thought of Jess and Alex and the other half a dozen grads and postdocs mentored by Adam whom she didn’t know very well. The thought of him finding them as annoying as they found him despotic made her chuckle. “To be fair, I don’t like people in general.”

“Right.” Don’t ask, Olive. Do not ask. “Do you like me?”

A millisecond of hesitation as he pressed his lips together. “Nope. You’re a smart-ass with abysmal taste in beverages.” He traced the corner of his iPad, a small smile playing on his lips. “Send me your slides.”

“My slides?”

“For your talk. I’ll take a look at them.”

Olive tried not to gape at him. “Oh—you . . . I’m not your grad. You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

“You really don’t have to—”

“I want to,” he said, voice pitched low and even as he looked into her eyes, and Olive had to avert her gaze because something felt too tight in her chest.

“Okay.” She finally managed to snap out the loose thread on her sleeve. “How likely is it that your feedback will cause me to cry under the shower?”

“That depends on the quality of your slides.”

She smiled. “Don’t feel like you have to hold back.”

“Believe me, I don’t.”

“Good. Great.” She sighed, but it was reassuring, knowing that he was going to be checking her work. “Will you come to my talk?” she heard herself ask, and was as surprised by the request as Adam seemed to be.

“I . . . Do you want me to?”

No. No, it’s going to be horrible, and humiliating, and probably a disaster, and you’re going to see me at my worst and weakest. It’s probably best if you lock yourself into the bathroom for the entire duration of the panel. Just so you don’t accidentally wander in and see me making a fool of myself.

And yet. Just the idea of having him there, sitting in the audience, made the prospect seem like less of an ordeal. He was not her adviser, and he wasn’t going to be able to do much if she got inundated by a barrage of impossible questions, or if the projector stopped working halfway through the talk. But maybe that wasn’t what she needed from him.

It hit her then what was so special about Adam. That no matter his reputation, or how rocky their first meeting, since the very beginning, Olive had felt that he was on her side. Over and over, and in ways that she could never have anticipated, he had made her feel unjudged. Less alone.

She exhaled slowly. The realization should have been rattling, but it had an oddly calming effect. “Yes,” she told him, thinking that this might very well turn out to be all right. She might never have what she wanted from Adam, but for now at least, he was in her life. That was going to have to be enough.

“I will, then.”

She leaned forward. “Will you ask a long-winded, leading question that will cause me to ramble incoherently and lose the respect of my peers, thus forever undermining my place in the field of biology?”