The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

chocolate chip cookie, a banana, and a pack of gum to her
coffee. To his credit, Adam said nothing and paid the resulting
$21.39 without batting an eye.
While they were waiting for their drinks, Olive’s mind
began drifting off to her project and to whether she could
convince Dr. Aslan to buy her better reagents soon. She looked
distractedly around the coffee shop, finding that even though
the research assistant, the postdoc, and one of the students
were gone, two grads (one of whom serendipitously happened
to work in Anh’s lab) were still sitting at a table by the door,
glancing toward them every few minutes. Excellent.
She leaned her hip against the counter and looked up at
Adam. Thank God this thing was only going to be ten minutes
a week, or she’d develop a permanent crick in her neck.
“Where were you born?” she asked.
“Is this another one of your green card marriage interview
questions?”
She giggled. He smiled in response, as if pleased to have
made her laugh. Though it was certainly for some other
reason.
“Netherlands. The Hague.”
“Oh.”
He leaned against the counter, too, directly in front of her.
“Why ‘oh’?”
“I don’t know.” Olive shrugged. “I think I expected . . .
New York? Or maybe Kansas?”
He shook his head. “My mother used to be a US
ambassador to the Netherlands.”
“Wow.” Weird, to imagine that Adam had a mother. A
family. That before being tall and scary and infamous, he’d
been a kid. Maybe he spoke Dutch. Maybe he had smoked