Page 37 of Conspiracies and Chemistry

“You did. And I do. Right now I’m questioning whether there’s a place in my life for my father. And after today? I’m not so sure.” My voice cracked, and my eyes burned at the backs with tears I refused to shed, even in the dark. “Next time you feel the urge to come visit, find a pay phone and call. I’ll let you know if you’re welcome.”

He squinted. “It’s worse than I thought. They’ve already poisoned your mind. Do you have any missing periods in your memory? Dreams of bright lights?”

“No, Dad. I haven’t been abducted. I’m drawing a boundary. Please respect it.” I tugged the door handle and shoved it open with my elbow. I jumped down and leaned into the cab. “Think about how your choices affect others. Goodbye.”

I slammed the door and walked to my porch, then I watched him drive away. We shared a past. We shared skepticism and mistrust too. But I didn’t have to like it.

17

Assay

Assay:A scientific procedure for analyzing the content or characteristics of a substance.

OLIVER

Iwas still riding the high of my successful talk, shaking the hand of one of my college professors who’d said he was impressed by my company’s research, when the last person I expected to see at the BMTC conference stepped up behind him.

“Tessa?” Had something terrible happened at the lab, so terrible that she’d had to fly out to Vegas to tell me?

Patting the professor’s shoulder, I told him we should catch up later, then I stepped to her side.

“What are you doing here?” She wore a black shirtdress and ankle boots, which shouldn’t look out of place in January in Las Vegas but somehow did. In a roomful of pale, shuffling scientists, she glowed like the neon signs outside. Maybe it was the fiery shade of her hair. Maybe it was something else that lit her up. I glanced toward the ceiling to check if there was a spotlight shining on her.

“I got a last-minute meeting with Dr. Shah from Sanctuary Health Network,” she said. “They want to buy our ovarian cancer test.”

Relief turned to joy, then panic. “You mean the test we haven’t fully vetted in the simulations, much less in clinical trials?”

“We’ll get it done,” she said serenely. “We have to.”

She was right about that. If we didn’t, Greenwich Biomedical, whose huge green banner hung outside the small ballroom I’d been presenting in, would come in and destroy everything Simon and I had built.

“Great job, by the way,” she said. “You were so passionate when you talked about predictive thresholds.” She had a little furrow between her eyebrows like it surprised her.

Maybe it did surprise her because someone who cared about her work, about her employees, wouldn’t have done what she did at Red Rover. Though the more I got to know her, the more I couldn’t square her past behavior with the present. A person who didn’t care about the people who worked for her wouldn’t have encouraged Sadie to cut back her hours and finish her doctorate. She wouldn’t have spun up the endometriosis project as a development opportunity for our female scientists. And when those protesters showed up, she’d have stayed safely inside the building and pretended their leader wasn’t her father.

It must have been scientific interest in discovering who my COO was beyond her flaming hair and her infamous past that made me blurt out, “Do you have plans for dinner?”

“I’m surprised,” she said, leaning her elbow on the table as she lifted her wineglass, “that you started Discovery Diagnostics at all. Wouldn’t it have been a safer move to work in R&D for one of the big pharmaceutical companies?”

“It would have,” I agreed. During dinner in a quiet corner of the hotel restaurant, we’d post-gamed the conference, and she’d dictated a list of follow-ups into her phone. As she finished her second glass of cabernet, the conversation had turned more personal. “Simon made me feel like we could do anything together. Like it wasn’t a risk at all. In hindsight, it was a huge risk to go out on our own. I guess he shielded me from the worst of it.”

“Or,” she said, swirling the ruby liquid in her glass, “you’re better at risk-taking than you think.”

I smoothed the imprint of my dinner plate from the tablecloth. “No. Since he’s been gone, I’ve been paralyzed. Second-guessing everything, even my work in the lab, which he never touched.”

“Grief can take different forms.” She set down her glass, and even though I didn’t look up, I could feel her lean forward. “My dad, for example. He was a pretty normal guy before my mom died. His grief turned to anger against the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies who couldn’t save her.”

“Yeah?” I looked up. This was the most personal thing I’d ever heard her say. “What was it like?”

“When my mom died?” She hesitated, then the fine lines across her forehead softened. “Terrible, of course. She got diagnosed at stage three, and the treatment plan was aggressive. They put her on chemo, and it was the worst. She was so sick and weak after. She’d have a few good days before her next treatment, and she…” Tessa blinked, and the rims of her eyes were red. “My god, I haven’t thought about this in forever. On her good days, we’d do something outside. Roller skating. The beach. A park. I was eleven, and I didn’t notice that our good-day activities got progressively lower-impact. She was getting sicker. In the end, there were no more good days at all.” She traced the base of her wineglass with a long, pale finger.

I remembered how pale Grandma Vee got at the end and how she hardly moved from her favorite recliner. “Then what happened?”

“We’d moved to the city to be closer to the hospital for her treatments, but Dad always preferred the rural life. After her funeral, Dad sold the house and moved us to a cabin next to a forest preserve. I went to another new school. That was hard.” She scrunched up her nose. “Dad joined some message boards. You know, conspiracy theories and such. He went to meetings. And after a while, he sold that place too and bought a camper so we never stayed in one place too long. Instead of sending me to high school, he homeschooled me. By which I mean, he left me to my own devices, and I educated myself.”

“He pulled you out of school and didn’t bother to teach you?” I clenched my fist. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been so reasonable with him when he’d come to the office.

She waved away my anger. “If I’d been in regular school, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to teach myself to code. I’d never have built my app. Though maybe I’d have learned more about people.” She pressed her lips together.

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