“I haven’t.”
“Yes, Ol, you have.” Anh’s eyes were earnest, burning into hers, and it occurred to Olive then, the enormity of what had happened. Of what Tom had done.
She took a shuddering breath. “If the situation were inverted, I would want to know. But it’s different.”
“Why is it different?”
Because I’m in love with Adam. And he’s not in love with me. Olive massaged her temples, trying to think against the mounting headache. “I don’t want to take something he loves away from him. Adam respects and admires Tom, and I know Tom’s had Adam’s back in the past. Maybe he’s better off not knowing.”
“If only there were a way to find out what Adam would prefer,” Malcolm said.
Olive sniffled in response. “Yeah.”
“If only there were someone who knows Adam very well that we might ask,” Malcolm said, louder this time.
“Yeah,” Anh repeated, “that would be great. But there isn’t, so—”
“If only there were someone in this room who recently started dating Adam’s closest friend of nearly three decades,” Malcolm near-yelled, full of passive-aggressive indignity, and Anh and Olive exchanged a wide-eyed look.
“Holden!”
“You could ask Holden for advice!”
Malcolm huffed. “You two can be so smart and yet so slow.”
Olive suddenly recalled something. “Holden hates Tom.”
“Uh? Why does he hate him?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Adam wrote it off as some odd personality quirk of Holden’s, but—”
“Hey. My man’s personality is perfect.”
“Maybe there is something else?”
Anh nodded energetically. “Malcolm, where can Olive find Holden right this minute?”
“I don’t know. But”—he tapped his phone with a smug smile—“I happen to have his number right here.”
* * *
—
HOLDEN (OR HOLDEN BubbleButt, as Malcolm had saved him in his contacts) was just finishing up his talk. Olive caught the last five minutes of it—something about crystallography she neither understood nor wanted to—and was totally unsurprised by how smooth and charismatic a speaker he was. She approached him on the podium once he was done answering questions, and he smiled when he noticed her walk up the stairs, seeming genuinely happy to see her.
“Olive. My new roommate-in-law!”
“Right. Yes. Um, great talk.” She ordered herself to stop wringing her hands. “I wanted to ask you a question
. . .”
“Is it about the nucleic acids in the fourth slide? Because I totally BS’d my way through them. My Ph.D. student made the figure, and she’s way smarter than me.”
“No. The question is about Adam—”
Holden’s expression brightened.
“Well, actually, it’s about Tom Benton.”