The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Tom Fucking Benton take credit for a project she had worked
on for years. A project that meant the world to her. Maybe her
life was nothing but a little sob story, but it was her little sob
story.
Her heart may be broken, but her brain was doing just fine.
Adam had said that the reason most professors hadn’t
bothered to reply, perhaps even read her email, was that she
was a student. So she followed his advice: she emailed Dr.
Aslan and asked her to introduce Olive to all the researchers
she’d previously contacted, plus the two people who’d been on
her panel and had shown interest in her work. Dr. Aslan was
close to retirement, and had more or less given up on
producing science, but she was still a full professor at
Stanford. It had to mean something.
Then Olive googled extensively about research ethics,
plagiarism, and theft of ideas. The issue was a little murky,
given that Olive had—quite recklessly, she now realized—
described all her protocols in detail in her report for Tom. But
once she began examining the situation with a clearer head,
she decided that it wasn’t as dire as she’d initially thought.
The report she’d written, after all, was well-structured and
thorough. With a few tweaks she could turn it into a scholarly
publication. It would hopefully go quickly through peer
review, and the findings would be credited under her name.
What she decided to focus on was that despite all his
insults and rude comments, Tom, one of the top cancer
researchers in the United States, had expressed interest in
stealing her research ideas. She took it as a very, very
backhanded compliment.
She spent the next several hours carefully avoiding
thoughts of Adam and instead researching other potential
scientists who might be able to support her the following year.
It was a long shot, but she had to try. When someone knocked