Page 279 - The Love Hypothesis

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 on her door, it was already the middle of the afternoon,
and she’d added three new names to her list. She quickly put on clothes to

answer, expecting housekeeping. When Anh and Malcolm stormed inside,
she cursed herself for never checking the peephole. She truly deserved to be
axed by a serial killer.

“Okay,” Anh said, throwing herself onto Olive’s still-made bed, “you
have two sentences to convince me that I shouldn’t be mad at you for