Page 52 of Conspiracies and Chemistry

“My god, what’s wrong?” I stepped into the office and shut the door. Had someone died?

“Now that we’ve gone to clinical trials, we’re going to have data coming back in a few weeks. I can’t decide how to analyze it.” He frowned at his screen. “Should we use LDA or logistic regression?”

My shoulders dropped away from my neck. Classic Oliver. My college statistics course was a long time ago, and I’d had to deep-dive into statistical methods for this job. “Well, the benefit of linear discriminant analysis is that it’s simple and efficient. But logistic regression could be more appropriate, assuming our data doesn’t follow a normal distribution.”

“I know,” he said. “So how do I decide what’s best?”

His uncertainty wasn’t because he was unintelligent or young or even indecisive. He proved in the lab every day how brilliant he was. And despite being ten years younger than me, he’d grown this company from a couple of college kids at a lab table to a billion-dollar company. That required emotional maturity. No, it was because Oliver cared so much about his company and everyone who worked here that he didn’t want to take even the tiniest risk of letting them down.

I got it, I really did. But I also understood that success requires risk. Though in this case, there wasn’t much. Either model would work to evaluate the test results. Maybe one would be slightly more predictive than the other, but we wouldn’t know until the product was out in the market and we had a larger data set. I circled his desk until I stood behind him. Then I reached over his shoulder and turned off his monitor. I set my hands lightly on his shoulders. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah.”

As I kneaded his muscles, the tension in his shoulders eased. When they’d softened from apocalypse-tense to everyday-tense, I said, “Got a coin?”

“A what?” His voice was low, almost dreamy.

“A quarter. You know, we used to use them in vending machines and arcade games before everything went cashless.”

“Maybe?” He opened his top drawer and fished in the corner. He pulled out a quarter and blew lint from it before holding it up. “This is what you charge for a shoulder massage?”

“No. This is how you make a decision between two equally good—or bad—options. Flip it. Heads, LDA. Tails, logistic regression.”

His shoulders tensed, and I lost every bit of progress I’d made in softening the muscles. He leaned forward to peer back at me. “We can’t flip a coin! This is a decision I have to make as the lead scientist.”

“You are making the decision,” I reminded him. “You’re just using a tool to help.” I tapped the coin sticking out of his white-knuckled fist. “Aren’t the models equally good?”

“Yes, but?—”

“Then it doesn’t matter. Go on.” I nudged his fist.

He opened his hand until the quarter lay flat on his palm. Then he picked it up. “Heads, LDA, tails, logistic regression?”

“That’s it.”

He flipped the coin, caught it deftly in his right hand, and plopped it onto the back of his left. When he pulled back his right hand, he said, “Tails. Logistic regression.”

“Does that feel right to you?” I asked. “Can you accept it?”

“Yes. It’s a valid model.”

“Then logistic regression it is. Done.” I pushed back the hair that flopped over his glasses. “You should go down to the lab and celebrate. Someone brought in champagne.”

He snorted.“Youbrought in champagne.”

“I’ll neither confirm nor deny it,” I said, starting to step back.

He grasped my wrist, stopping me. “Thank you.”

“For the champagne? Like I said, I?—”

“No.” He was up out of his chair faster than I’d have thought possible, still holding my wrist and crowding into me. My hand landed over his pounding heart. “Thank you for being my…my partner in all this. For helping me. For grounding me when I get too deep in my head.”

“That’s what I was hired to do,” I reminded him. But I knew I’d done more than what was in my job description. And here I was, edging over the line of what was appropriate for my job as I tipped up my face to stare at his lips. He’d bitten them while he’d been mulling his options, and they were pink and plump.

“That’s not what this is,” he growled. “This is more.” He angled his face down until his lips hovered a breath above mine.

He was right. We were more than coworkers. More than friends. And we were about to cross the border into the land of Even More. It shimmered in the air for a moment in the narrow space between our lips.

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