“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.”

Chapter Six

HYPOTHESIS: When compared with multiple types and models of furniture, Adam Carlsen’s lap will be rated in the top fifth percentile for comfort, coziness, and enjoyment.

The moment Olive opened the door of the auditorium she and Anh exchanged a wide-eyed look and said, in unison, “Holy shit.”

In her two years at Stanford she had been to countless seminars, trainings, lectures, and classes in this lecture hall, and yet she’d never seen the room this full. Maybe Tom was giving out free beer?

“I think they made the talk mandatory for immunology and pharmacology,” Anh said. “And I overheard at least five people in the hallway saying that Benton is ‘a known science hottie.’ ” She stared critically at the podium, where Tom was chatting with Dr. Moss from immunology. “I guess he’s cute. Though not nearly as cute as Jeremy.”

Olive smiled. The air in the room was hot and humid, smelling like sweat and too many human beings. “You don’t have to stay. This is probably a fire hazard and not even remotely relevant to your research—”

“It beats doing actual work.” She grabbed Olive’s wrist, pulling her through the throng of grads and postdocs crowding the entrance and down the stairs on the side. They were just as packed. “And if this guy is going to take you away from me and to Boston for an entire year, I want to make sure that he deserves you.” She winked. “Consider my presence the equivalent of a father cleaning his rifle in front of his daughter’s boyfriend before prom.”

“Aww, Daddy.”

There was nowhere to sit, of course, not even on the floor or on the steps.

Olive spotted Adam in an aisle seat a few meters away. He was back to his usual black Henley and deep in conversation with Holden Rodrigues. When Adam’s eyes met Olive’s, she grinned and waved at him. For some yet unknown reason that likely had to do with the fact that they were sharing this

huge, ridiculous, unlikely secret, Adam now felt like a friendly face. He didn’t wave back, but his gaze seemed softer and warmer, and his mouth curved into that tilt that she’d learned to recognize as his version of a smile.

“I can’t believe they didn’t switch the talk to one of the bigger auditoriums. There is not nearly enough space for— Oh, no. No, no, no.”

Olive followed Anh’s gaze, and saw at least twenty new people arrive.