Olive looked at her, speechless. “This is . . . you’re amazing.”
“I am, aren’t I? Okay, now’s your turn to grovel. Aaand, go.”
Olive opened her mouth, but for a long time nothing really came out. “I don’t really have an excuse. I was just busy with . . . something Dr. Aslan asked me to finish.”
“This is ridiculous. You are in Boston. You should be out there in an Irish pub pretending you love the Red Sox and eating Dunkies, not doing work. For your boss.”
“We’re technically here for a work conference,” Olive pointed out.
“Conference shmonference.” Malcolm joined Anh on the bed.
“Can we please go out, the three of us?” Anh begged. “Let’s do the Freedom Trail. With ice cream. And beer.”
“Where’s Jeremy?”
“Presenting his poster. And I’m bored.” Anh’s grin was impish.
Olive was not in the mood for socializing, or beer, or freedom trails, but at some point she was going to have to learn to productively navigate society with a broken heart.
She smiled and said, “Let me check my email, and then we can go.” She had, inexplicably, accumulated about fifteen messages in the thirty minutes since she’d last checked, only one of which wasn’t spam.
Today, 3:11 p.m.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Reaching out to researchers for pancreatic cancer project
Olive,
I’d be happy to introduce you and ask scholars about opportunities for you in their labs. I agree that they might be more welcoming if the email comes from me. Send me your list, please.
BTW, you still haven’t sent the recording of your talk. I cannot wait to listen to it!
Warmly,
Aysegul Aslan, Ph.D.
Olive did some mental calculations to determine whether it was polite to send the list and not the recording （probably not）， sighed, and started AirDropping the file to her laptop. When she realized that it was several hours long, because she’d forgotten to stop her phone after her talk, her sigh morphed into a groan. “This’ll take a while, guys. I have to send Dr. Aslan an audio file, and I’ll need to edit it beforehand.”
“Fine,” Anh huffed. “Malcolm, would you like to entertain us with tales of your date with Holden?”
“Okay, first, he wore the cutest baby-blue button-down.”
“Baby-blue?”
“Shut your mouth with that skeptical tone. Then he got me one flower.”
“Where did he get the flower?”
“Not sure.”
Olive poked around the MP3, trying to figure out where to cut the file. The ending was just minute after minute of silence, from when she’d left her phone in the hotel room. “Maybe he stole it from the buffet?” she said absentmindedly. “I think I saw pink carnations downstairs.”
“Was it a pink carnation?”
“Maybe.”
Anh cackled. “And they say romance is dead.”
“Shut up. Then, toward the beginning of the date, something happened. Something catastrophic that could only ever happen to me, given that my entire damn family is obsessed with science and, therefore, attends all the conferences. All of them.”
“No. Tell me you didn’t—”
“Yes. When we got to the restaurant, we found my mother, father, uncle, and grandfather. Who insisted on us joining them. Which means that my first date with Holden was a freaking Thanksgiving dinner.”