The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Adam was still around. The reason she’d gotten the
opportunity to know him. “It must be nice to be excited about
work again.”
“It is. Academia takes a lot from you and gives back very
little. It’s hard to stick around without a good reason to do so.”
She nodded absentmindedly, thinking that the words
sounded familiar. Not just the content, but the delivery, too.
Not surprising, though: it was exactly what The Guy in the
bathroom had told her all those years ago. Academia’s a lot of
bucks for very little bang. What matters is whether your reason
to be in academia is good enough.
Suddenly, something clicked in her brain.
The deep voice. The blurry dark hair. The crisp, precise
way of talking. Could The Guy in the bathroom and Adam
be . . .
No. Impossible. The Guy was a student—though, had he
explicitly said so? No. No, what he’d said was This is my lab’s
bathroom and that he’d been there for six years, and he hadn’t
answered when she’d asked about his dissertation timeline,
and—
Impossible. Improbable. Inconceivable.
Just like everything else about Adam and Olive.
Oh God. What if they’d really met years ago? He probably
didn’t remember, anyway. Surely. Olive had been no one. Still
was no one. She thought about asking him, but why? He had
no idea that a five-minute conversation with him had been the
exact push Olive needed. That she’d thought about him for
years.
Olive remembered her last words to him—Maybe I’ll see
you next year—and oh, if only she’d known. She felt a surge
of something warm and soft in the squishy part of herself that