Page 50 - The Love Hypothesis

this room.”

“I think we can both agree that nothing that has happened in this room
should ever leave it.”
“Good point,” he conceded. He paused. Sighed. Chewed on the inside of

his cheek for a second. Sighed again.
“Okay,” he finally said, sounding like a man who knew that he was

going to regret speaking the second he opened his mouth. “I’m considered a
flight risk.”

“Flight risk?” God, he was a felon on parole. A jury of his peers had
convicted him for crimes against grad students. He’d probably whacked

someone on the head with a microscope for mislabeling peptide samples.
“So it is something criminal.”
“What? No. The department suspects that I’m making plans to leave

Stanford and move to another institution. Normally it wouldn’t bother me,
but Stanford has decided to freeze my research funds.”

“Oh.” Not what she’d thought. Not at all. “Can they?”
“Yes. Well, up to one-third of them. The reasoning is that they don’t

want to fund the research and further the career of someone who—they
believe—is going to leave anyway.”

“But if it’s only one-third—”
“It’s millions of dollars,” he said levelly. “That I had earmarked for
projects that I planned to finish within the next year. Here, at Stanford.

Which means that I need those funds soon.”
“Oh.” Come to think of it, Olive had been hearing scuttlebutt about

Carlsen being recruited by other universities since her first year. A few
months earlier there had even been a rumor that he might go work for

NASA. “Why do they think that? And why now?”
“A number of reasons. The most relevant is that a few weeks ago I was

awarded a grant—a very large grant—with a scientist at another institution.
That institution had tried to recruit me in the past, and Stanford sees the
collaboration as an indication that I am planning to accept.” He hesitated

before continuing. “More generally, I have been made aware that the . . .