The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

“Should you be having caffeine at”—Olive glanced at the
clock—“ten twenty-seven p.m.?” Come to think of it, he
shouldn’t be having caffeine at all, given his baseline shiny
personality. And yet the two of them got coffee together every
Wednesday. Olive was nothing but an enabler.
“I doubt I’ll be sleeping much, anyway.”
“Why?”
“I need to run a set of last-minute analyses for a grant due
on Sunday night.”
“Oh.” She leaned back, finding a more comfortable
position. “I thought you had minions for that.”
“As it turns out, asking your grads to pull an all-nighter for
you is frowned upon by HR.”
“What a travesty.”
“Truly. What about you?”
“Tom’s report.” She sighed. “I’m supposed to send it to
him tomorrow and there’s a section that I just don’t . . .” She
sighed again. “I’m rerunning a few analyses, just to make sure
that everything is perfect, but the equipment I’m working with
is not exactly . . . ugh.”
“Have you told Aysegul?”
Aysegul, he’d said. Naturally. Because Adam was a
colleague of Dr. Aslan, not her grad, and it made sense that
he’d think of her as Aysegul. It wasn’t the first time he’d
called her that; it wasn’t even the first time Olive had noticed.
It was just hard to reconcile, when they were sitting alone and
talking quietly, that Adam was faculty and Olive was very
much not. Worlds apart, really.
“I did, but there’s no money to get anything better. She’s a
great mentor, but . . . last year her husband got sick and she
decided to retire early, and sometimes it feels like she’s