Page 18 of The Love Hypothesis

She narrowed her eyes. “What reasons?”

“Reasons.”

“If it’s criminal, I’d rather not be involved.”

He smiled a bit. “It’s not.”

“If you don’t tell me, I have no choice but to assume that it entails kidnapping. Or arson. Or embezzlement.”

He seemed preoccupied for a moment, fingertips drumming against a large biceps. It considerably strained his shirt. “If I tell you, it cannot leave this room.”

“I think we can both agree that nothing that has happened in this room should ever leave it.”

“Good point,” he conceded. He paused. Sighed. Chewed on the inside of his cheek for a second. Sighed again.

“Okay,” he finally said, sounding like a man who knew that he was going to regret speaking the second he opened his mouth. “I’m considered a flight risk.”

“Flight risk?” God, he was a felon on parole. A jury of his peers had convicted him for crimes against grad students. He’d probably whacked someone on the head with a microscope for mislabeling peptide samples. “So it is something criminal.”

“What? No. The department suspects that I’m making plans to leave Stanford and move to another institution. Normally it wouldn’t bother me, but Stanford has decided to freeze my research funds.”

“Oh.” Not what she’d thought. Not at all. “Can they?”

“Yes. Well, up to one-third of them. The reasoning is that they don’t want to fund the research and further the career of someone who—they believe—is going to leave anyway.”

“But if it’s only one-third—”

“It’s millions of dollars,” he said levelly. “That I had earmarked for projects that I planned to finish within the next year. Here, at Stanford. Which means that I need those funds soon.”

“Oh.” Come to think of it, Olive had been hearing scuttlebutt about Carlsen being recruited by other universities since her first year. A few months earlier there had even been a rumor that he might go work for NASA. “Why do they think that? And why now?”

“A number of reasons. The most relevant is that a few weeks ago I was awarded a grant—a very large grant—with a scientist at another institution. That institution had tried to recruit me in the past, and Stanford sees the collaboration as an indication that I am planning to accept.” He hesitated before continuing. “More generally, I have been made aware that the . . . optics are that I have not put down roots because I want to be able to flee Stanford at the drop of a hat.”

?

??Roots?”

“Most of my grads will be done within the year. I have no extended family in the area. No wife, no children. I’m currently renting—I’d have to buy a house just to convince the department that I’m committed to staying,” he said, clearly irritated. “If I was in a relationship . . . that would really help.”

Okay. That made sense. But. “Have you considered getting a real girlfriend?”

His eyebrow lifted. “Have you considered getting a real date?”

“Touché.”

Olive fell silent and studied him for a few moments, letting him study her in return. Funny how she used to be scared of him. Now he was the only person in the world who knew about her worst fuckup ever, and it was hard to feel intimidated—even harder, after discovering that he was the kind of person who’d be desperate enough to pretend to date someone to get his research funds back. Olive was sure that she would do the exact same for the opportunity to finish her study on pancreatic cancer, which made Adam seem oddly . . . relatable. And if he was relatable, then she could go ahead and fake-date him, right?

No. Yes. No. What? She was crazy for even considering this. She was certifiably mental. And yet she found herself saying, “It would be complicated.”

“What would be?”

“To pretend that we’re dating.”

“Really? It would be complicated to make people think that we’re dating?”

Oh, he was impossible. “Okay, I see your point. But it would be hard to do so convincingly for a prolonged period.”

He shrugged. “We’ll be fine, as long as we say hi to each other in the hallways and you don’t call me Dr. Carlsen.”