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Chapter Nineteen

Olive spent the following day in the hotel, sleeping, crying, and doing the very thing that had gotten her into this mess to begin with: lying. She told Malcolm and Anh that she’d be busy with friends from college for the entire day, pulled the blackout curtains together, and then buried herself in her bed. Which, technically, was Adam’s bed.

She didn’t let herself think about the situation too much. Something inside her—her heart, very possibly—was broken in several large pieces, not shattered as much as neatly snapped in half, and then in half again. All she could do was sit down amid the debris of her feelings and wallow. Sleeping through most of the day helped dull the pain a great deal. Numb, she was rapidly starting to realize, was good.

She lied the day after, too. Feigned a last-minute request from Dr. Aslan when asked to join her friends at the conference or on excursions around Boston, and then took a deep, fortifying breath. She drew the curtains open, forced her blood to start flowing again (with fifty crunches, fifty jumping jacks, and fifty push-ups, though she cheated on the last by going on her knees), then showered and brushed her teeth for the first time in thirty-six hours.

It wasn’t easy. Seeing Adam’s Biology Ninja T-shirt in the mirror made her tear up, but she reminded herself that she’d made her choice. She’d decided to put Adam’s well-being first, and she didn’t regret it. But she’d be damned if she let Tom Fucking Benton take credit for a project she had worked on for years. A project that meant the world to her. Maybe her life was nothing but a little sob story, but it was her little sob story.

Her heart may be broken, but her brain was doing just fine.

Adam had said that the reason most professors hadn’t bothered to reply, perhaps even read her email, was that she was a student. So she followed his advice: she emailed Dr. Aslan and asked her to introduce Olive to all the researchers she’d previously contacted, plus the two people who’d been on her panel and had shown interest in her work. Dr. Aslan was close to retirement, and had more or less given up on producing science, but she was still a full professor at Stanford. It had to mean something.

Then Olive googled extensively about research ethics, plagiarism, and theft of ideas. The issue was a little murky, given that Olive had—quite recklessly, she now realized—described all her protocols in detail in her report for Tom. But once she began examining the situation with a clearer head, she decided that it wasn’t as dire as she’d initially thought. The report she’d written, after all, was well-structured and thorough. With a few tweaks she could turn it into a scholarly publication. It would hopefully go quickly through peer review, and the findings would be credited under her name.

What she decided to focus on was that despite all his insults and rude comments, Tom, one of the top cancer researchers in the United States, had expressed interest in stealing her research ideas. She took it as a very, very backhanded compliment.

She spent the next several hours carefully avoiding thoughts of Adam and instead researching other potential scientists who might be able to support her the following year. It was a long shot, but she had to try. When someone knocked on her door, it was already the middle of the afternoon, and she’d added three new names to her list. She quickly put on clothes to answer, expecting housekeeping. When Anh and Malcolm stormed inside, she cursed herself for never checking the peephole. She truly deserved to be axed by a serial killer.

“Okay,” Anh said, throwing herself onto Olive’s still-made bed, “you have two sentences to convince me that I shouldn’t be mad at you for forgetting to ask how my outreach event went.”

“Shit!” Olive covered her mouth with her hand. “I am so sorry. How did it go?”

“Perfect.” Anh’s eyes were shiny with happiness. “We had such great attendance and everyone loved it. We’re thinking of making this a yearly thing, and formally establishing an organization. Peer-to-peer mentoring! Hear this: every grad is assigned two undergrads. Once they get into grad school, they mentor two more undergrads each. And in ten years we take over the entire damn world.”

Olive looked at her, speechless. “This is . . . you’re amazing.”

“I am, aren’t I? Okay, now’s your turn to grovel. Aaand, go.”

Olive opened her mouth, but for a long time nothing really came out. “I don’t really have an excuse. I was just busy with . . . something Dr. Aslan asked me to finish.”

“This is ridiculous. You are in Boston. You should be out there in an Irish pub pretending you love the Red Sox and eating Dunkies, not doing work. For your boss.”

“We’re technically here for a work conference,” Olive pointed out.

“Conference shmonference.” Malcolm joined Anh on the bed.

“Can we please go out, the three of us?” Anh begged. “Let’s do the Freedom Trail. With ice cream. And beer.”

“Where’s Jeremy?”

“Presenting his poster. And I’m bored.” Anh’s grin was impish.

Olive was not in the mood for socializing, or beer, or freedom trails, but at some point she was going to have to learn to productively navigate society with a broken heart.

She smiled and said, “Let me check my email, and then we can go.” She had, inexplicably, accumulated about fifteen messages in the thirty minutes since she’d last checked, only one of which wasn’t spam.

Today, 3:11 p.m.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Reaching out to researchers for pancreatic cancer project

Olive,

I’d be happy to introduce you and ask scholars about opportunities for you in their labs. I agree that they might be more welcoming if the email comes from me. Send me your list, please.

BTW, you still haven’t sent the recording of your talk. I cannot wait to listen to it!

Warmly,

Aysegul Aslan, Ph.D.

Olive did some mental calculations to determine whether it was polite to send the list and not the recording (probably not), sighed, and started AirDropping the file to her laptop. When she realized that it was several hours long, because she’d forgotten to stop her phone after her talk, her sigh morphed into a groan. “This’ll take a while, guys. I have to send Dr. Aslan an audio file, and I’ll need to edit it beforehand.”

“Fine,” Anh huffed. “Malcolm, would you like to entertain us with tales of your date with Holden?”

“Okay, first, he wore the cutest baby-blue button-down.”

“Baby-blue?”

“Shut your mouth with that skeptical tone. Then he got me one flower.”

“Where did he get the flower?”

“Not sure.”

Olive poked around the MP3, trying to figure out where to cut the file. The ending was just minute after minute of silence, from when she’d left her phone in the hotel room. “Maybe he stole it from the buffet?” she said absentmindedly. “I think I saw pink carnations downstairs.”