Page 2 of Conspiracies and Chemistry

He glanced at my almost-full seltzer. “I’ll come. Tessa, what can I get you?”

“Whiskey?” She turned her gaze on Andrew, and I wanted to leap in front of him and capture it all for myself.

“Neat?” he asked.

“Please.” Her husky voice teased like a caress along my spine.

My glasses were fogging up. I ripped my gaze off her tight black turtleneck hugging the curves of her breasts and strode into the kitchen. As I flung open the refrigerator door, the beer bottles in the door rattled. I stuck my whole face inside, pretending to read the labels as I let the frigid air chill my hot cheeks.

“Look, I’m sorry.” Andrew’s voice came from behind me. “I thought she’d flake on us again. Can’t you…”

I slammed the refrigerator shut. I didn’t want a beer. I never wanted anything to dull my wits, not anymore, and especially not with heraround. “Can’t I what?”

“Be nice?” His smile was bright with hope. “For my sake. You’re my best friend, and she’s one of Carly’s gang. They do everything together, and it’d be amazing if I wasn’t the only guy tagging along.” But we’d tried that before.

Last month, at Andrew and Carly’s engagement party, the second I’d seen Tessa, I’d approached her, determined to impress her with my sparkling wit and sophisticated conversation and get her to finally notice me. But when I was close enough to count every freckle, my brain blue-screened. I couldn’t think of a single word to say to the brilliant, gorgeous, worldly woman. She’d looked down her nose at me like I was a gangly teenager and not someone who was only ten or so years younger than her, then turned and walked away.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. “I don’t think so. I’m dealing with a lot of bullshit at work.” Which was true, even if it wasn’t the real reason I couldn’t be Andrew’s extraneous wheel.

“Hey.” His forehead furrowed in concern. “What’s wrong?”

I leaned against the stainless-steel refrigerator. “The CEO’s breathing down my neck about the numbers because the board’s breathing downherneck. Apparently, we haven’t released a new product since January, so ten months, and revenues have been dropping ever since.” I waited. Andrew was a former banker and the smartest guy I knew with financial stuff. He had to have an answer for me.

“Makes sense.”

“That’s it? ‘Makes sense’? Don’t you have a strategy for me?”

“Yeah.” He smirked. “Release a new fucking product. How close are you guys?”

“I don’t know. Not close.” The tasks piled up in my imagination like a stack of Jenga blocks.

Assay design.

Simulations.

Validation.

If one of those went wrong, the whole tower would topple, and we’d have to start over. We’d set a daunting challenge: a noninvasive biomarker test for ovarian cancer. It had never been done, but I knew with enough time and resources, our team could do it.

I’d watched someone I loved waste away with it, and the last thing I wanted was to rush a product to market that would give people false fear—or hope. It had to be accurate. Ninety percent would be good. But one hundred percent was my target.

Our CEO, Dr. Perrell, was far more interested in profit than accuracy. “I don’t know if I can do this without him.” Simon used to know how to talk to her.

Andrew palmed my shoulder. “Of course you can. He had faith in you.”

“Did he?” I looked down at the toes of my sneakers. “He shielded me from so much I didn’t even know about.” Our competitors’ schedules. Pressure from the board. And visits to my lab from Dr. Perrell.

“He did it so you could do the work. You need someone to run interference like he did.”

Kraken tentacles squeezed my heart. No one could replace Simon. I wasn’t sure I wanted someone to sit in his office and do all the things he loved to do and pretend to be him.

“An insufficiently validated test will do more harm than good. The board doesn’t understand the risks they’re asking me to take. We’d lose everything Simon and I worked so hard to build.”

“Tell them that,” my friend said. “Besides, you’ve still got enough voting power to control the company’s destiny.”

I forced a smile. I did, as long as I could sway a couple board members to my side. But was it the right thing to do?

Simon used to challenge me when I was moving too slowly. It was how we’d built the company from a tiny corner of our bioengineering lab in college to an entire building in Silicon Valley with thousands of square feet of dedicated laboratory space. I could never have done it on my own.

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