The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

“If you were a half-decent ally to any of the grads in the
department, you would just dump your fucking boyfriend.”
“How— Do you even realize how little sense you are . . .”
No reason to finish her sentence, since Greg was storming
out of the lab and slamming the door behind him, clearly
uninterested in anything Olive might have wanted to add. She
ran a hand down her face, unsettled by what had just
happened.
“He’s not . . . he doesn’t really mean it. Not about you, at
least,” Chase said while scratching his head. A nice reminder
that he’d been standing there, in the room, for the entirety of
this conversation. Front-row seat. It was going to take maybe
fifteen minutes before everyone in the program knew about it.
“Greg needs to graduate in the spring with his wife. So that
they can find postdocs together. They don’t want to live apart,
you know.”
She nodded—she hadn’t known, but she could imagine.
Some of her anger dissipated. “Yeah, well.” Being horrible to
me isn’t going to make his thesis work go any faster, she didn’t
add.
Chase sighed. “It’s not personal. But you have to
understand that it’s weird for us. Because Carlsen . . . Maybe
he wasn’t on any of your committees, but you must know the
kind of guy he is, right?”
She was unsure how to respond.
“And now you guys are dating, and . . .” Chase shrugged
with a nervous smile. “It shouldn’t be a matter of taking sides,
but sometimes it can feel like it, you know?”
Chase’s words lingered for the rest of the day. Olive
thought about them as she ran her mice through her
experimental protocols, and then later while she tried to figure
out what to do with those two outliers that made her findings