Page 87 - The Love Hypothesis

public, and . . . that was not something she enjoyed or excelled at. It made

her feel panicky and judged, as though pinned to a microscope slide, and
her ability to produce syntactically coherent sentences invariably leaked out
of her brain.

Like right now. Olive felt her cheeks heat and her tongue tie and—
“What kind of question is that?” Adam interjected.

When she glanced at him, he was scowling at Tom, who just shrugged.
“What’s cool about your project?” Adam repeated back.

“Yeah. Cool. You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think I do, and maybe neither does Olive.”

Tom huffed. “Fine, what would you ask?”
Adam turned to Olive. His knee brushed her leg, warm and oddly
reassuring through her jeans. “What issues does your project target? Why

do you think it’s significant? What gaps in the literature does it fill? What
techniques are you using? What challenges do you foresee?”

Tom huffed. “Right, sure. Consider all those long, boring questions
asked, Olive.”

She glanced at Adam, finding that he was studying her with a calm,
encouraging expression. The way he’d formulated the questions helped her

reorganize her thoughts, and realizing that she had answers for each one
melted most of her panic. It probably hadn’t been intentional on Adam’s
part, but he’d done her a solid.

Olive was reminded of that guy from the bathroom, from years ago. I
have no idea if you’re good enough, he’d told her. What matters is whether

your reason to be in academia is good enough. He’d said that Olive’s
reason was the best one, and therefore, she could do this. She needed to do

this.
“Okay,” she started again after a deep breath, gathering what she’d

rehearsed the previous night with Malcolm. “Here’s the deal. Pancreatic
cancer is very aggressive and deadly. It has very poor prognosis, with only
one out of four people alive a year after diagnosis.” Her voice, she thought,

sounded less breathy and more self-assured. Good. “The problem is that it’s
so hard to detect, we are only able to diagnose it very late in the game. At