The Love Hypothesis

“In the next few years,” Olive confirmed. She loved her adviser, who had always been supportive and encouraging. Since the very beginning she had given Olive the freedom to develop her own research program, which was almost unheard of for Ph.D. students. Having a hands-off mentor was great when it came to pursuing her interests, but . . .

“If Aslan’s retiring soon, she’s not applying for grants anymore—understandable, since she won’t be around long enough to see the projects through—which means that your lab is not exactly flush with cash right now,” Tom summarized perfectly. “Okay, tell me about your project. What’s cool about it?”

“I . . . ,” Olive began—she scrambled to collect her thoughts. “So, it’s—” Another pause. Longer this time, and more painfully awkward. “Um . . .”

This, precisely, was her problem. Olive knew that she was an excellent scientist, that she had the discipline and the critical-thinking skills to produce good work in the lab. Unfortunately succeeding in academia also required the ability to pitch one’s work, sell it to strangers, present it in public, and . . . that was not something she enjoyed or excelled at. It made her feel panicky and judged, as though pinned to a microscope slide, and her ability to produce syntactically coherent sentences invariably leaked out of her brain.

Like right now. Olive felt her cheeks heat and her tongue tie and—

“What kind of question is that?” Adam interjected.

When she glanced at him, he was scowling at Tom, who just shrugged.

“What’s cool about your project?” Adam repeated back.

“Yeah. Cool. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do, and maybe neither does Olive.”

Tom huffed. “Fine, what would you ask?”

Adam turned to Olive. His knee brushed her leg, warm and oddly reassuring through her jeans. “What issues does your project target? Why do you think it’s significant? What gaps in the literature does it fill? What techniques are you using? What challenges do you foresee?”

Tom huffed. “Right, sure. Consider all those long, boring questions asked, Olive.”

She glanced at Adam, finding that he was studying her with a calm, encouraging expression. The way he’d formulated the questions helped her reorganize her thoughts, and realizing that she had answers for each one melted most of her panic. It probably hadn’t been intentional on Adam’s part, but he’d done her a solid.

Olive was reminded of that guy from the bathroom, from years ago. I have no idea if you’re good enough, he’d told her. What matters is whether your reason to be in academia is good enough. He’d said that Olive’s reason was the best one, and therefore, she could do this. She needed to do this.

“Okay,” she started again after a deep breath, gathering what she’d rehearsed the previous night with Malcolm. “Here’s the deal. Pancreatic cancer is very aggressive and deadly. It has very poor prognosis, with only one out of four people alive a year after diagnosis.” Her voice, she thought, sounded less breathy and more self-assured. Good. “The problem is that it’s so hard to detect, we are only able to diagnose it very late in the game. At that point, the cancer has already spread so widely, most treatments can’t do much to counteract it. But if diagnosis were faster—”

“People could get treatment sooner and have a higher chance of survival,” Tom said, nodding a bit impatiently. “Yep, I’m well aware. We already have some screening tools, though. Like imaging.”

She wasn’t surprised he brought it up, since imaging was what Tom’s lab focused on. “Yes, but that’s expensive, time-consuming, and often not useful because of the pancreas’s position. But . . .” She took another deep breath. “I think I have found a set of biomarkers. Not from tissue biopsy—blood biomarkers. Noninvasive, easy to obtain. Cheap. In mice they can detect pancreatic cancer as early as stage one.”

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?”