Not in Love by Ali Hazelwood

I didn’t move. My feet were rooted to the ground. “But?”

“Well, it was Brock who brought it up. He said, ‘What about all the biofuel stuff you’ve been working on? Can’t you start your own company centered around that?’ And I . . .” She paused for a long, long while. “I began looking into how I could make it happen.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “And you didn’t give the others any of the credit.”

“Come on.” She laughed. “Hark and Eli were never going to get credit. They were grad students, for fuck’s sake. No grad student gets credit for the kind of ideas they help refine. Their contributions were grunt work. Was I supposed to share the patent with two men, just because they’d run a couple of assays for me? Please. I knew they’d be fine.”

Eli hadn’t been, though. Nor Hark, I suspected. “What about Minami?”

“See, that’s . . .” Florence nodded slowly. “That really does hurt, in hindsight. I feel horrible for not including her in the patent. But I didn’t have any other choice. You know how hard it is, for women in our field. I was in a terrible situation, and—”

“Minami is a woman, too, and a more junior academic,” I interrupted harshly. I highly doubted Minami’s career had been as privileged as Florence’s. “And that’s not—Florence, having it hard doesn’t give us a pass to cheat other people out of their work, especially not to screw over people who have it harder.”

“I know. And I felt horrible—why do you think I spent the following years knee deep in mentorship programs, trying to uplift junior scientists? I was trying to atone for that.”

“The only correct way to atone is to give Minami credit.”

“Rue, if I hadn’t done what needed to be done, you know who would have owned the patent? Not me. Not Minami. Not Eli or Hark. UT would have owned it.”

“So what?” I blinked in confusion. “So it was okay to sacrifice everyone as long as you got it? It was Minami’s idea.”

“Only partially! I helped Minami refine it. I lent her my expertise. If it hadn’t been for me, it wouldn’t have moved past the most preliminary stages.”

“That’s not what Eli thinks.”

“Then he’s lying. Do you really believe him over me?”

You did lie to me, I wanted to say. Why did you lie to me? But the answer was obvious. And even if everything Florence was saying was true, even if her contribution was superior to everyone else’s, did that make what she’d done forgivable?

I studied her face, truly seeing it for the first time. Florence stared back, and then began laughing. “You know what this feels like?”

I remained silent.

“Like Eli and I are fighting over you.” She was still chuckling, but I could not see the humor. And my heart did hurt for Eli, but . . .

“The person on whose behalf I feel the most outrage, right now, is Minami.”

“Rue. I . . . I just hope you’ll be able to see my point of view. I hope that you realize that I had to make some very difficult choices, and forgive me.”

“It’s not my forgiveness you need,” I said.

She called after me, but I strode to my car without hesitation.





32





LET’S TRY TO MAKE IT RIGHT





RUE

And you’re really sure that she admitted to it?” Tisha asked for what had to be the fourth time. I’d already replied to the first three, but still didn’t blame her. I could scarcely believe it, and had gotten it straight from the source.

“I am.”

“And it’s not some kind of . . . I don’t know, a stroke. Or, I don’t know how common folies à deux are these days, but maybe Florence and Eli are both in the throes of one? Maybe it’s not quite the way Eli painted it? A misunderstanding, in which Florence is not nearly as gaslight-gatekeep-girlbossy as he’s trying to make her out. Or the Harkness people could be biased and exaggerating their contribution to the tech. I mean, are you really sure that she—”

“Admitted to it?” Diego shouted from Tisha’s kitchenette. Then he came to lean against the doorjamb—a bare-chested, bespectacled, body-built nerd who couldn’t have been more Tisha’s type. Tisha had supposedly been working from home, but her short kimono clearly broadcast that they had been in the middle of something when I barged in. Diego had taken my uninvited appearance like a champ. “Rue, could you please tell Tisha whether you’re really sure that Florence admitted to it?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Let us know if you change your mind.”

“Never.”

“Understood.”

I hadn’t liked a Tisha boyfriend this much in years, and hoped he’d stick around. Even Bruce seemed to be a fan, rubbing himself against Diego’s calves while shooting me his repertoire of skeptical glances.

“Okay, you two can stop being chummy and cahootsy against me.”

Diego and I exchanged one last cahootsy look before he disappeared into the bedroom. It was an immense relief, being with Tisha. Sharing the burden of today’s discovery. The last few hours had upended the last few years of my life, but Tisha was here, unchanged. Still standing as everything else crumbled down.