The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

with an uneasy expression and started gingerly patting his
back.
Olive looked longingly at her RNA samples. Then she
stepped closer to Greg’s bench and asked, “What’s wrong?”
She had expected the answer to be The production of my
reagent has been discontinued, or My p-value is .06, or Grad
school was a mistake, but now it’s too late to back out of it
because my self-worth is unbreakably tied to my academic
performance, and what would even be left of me if I decided to
drop out?
Instead what she got was: “Your stupid boyfriend is what’s
wrong.”
By now the fake dating had been going on for over two
weeks: Olive didn’t startle anymore when someone referred to
Adam as her boyfriend. Still, Greg’s words were so
unexpected and full of venom that she couldn’t help but
answer, “Who?”
“Carlsen.” He spat the name out like a curse.
“Oh.”
“He’s on Greg’s dissertation committee,” Chase explained
in a significantly milder tone, not quite meeting Olive’s eyes.
“Oh. Right.” This could be bad. Very bad. “What
happened?”
“He failed my proposal.”
“Shit.” Olive bit into her lower lip. “I’m sorry, Greg.”
“This is going to set me back a lot. It’ll take me months to
revise it, all because Carlsen had to go and nitpick. I didn’t
even want him on my committee; Dr. Aslan forced me to add
him because she’s so obsessed with his stupid computational
stuff.”