Chapter 3
I’d cleaned my office twice. First on Sunday night after Fern went down, moving through the small space with a rag and a bottle of all-purpose cleaner, wiping down the desk, the bookshelves, the windowsill where dust collected against the bottom pane.
Then again on Monday morning before the board arrived, because the Sunday cleaning had been about anxiety and the Monday cleaning was about presentation, and they were not the same thing.
My office was nothing like the spaces I used to occupy in Liam’s world.
Nine feet by eleven, fluorescent overheads, a window that looked out on the parking lot of the adjacent building.
The desk was metal, government-surplus, the kind that would survive a bomb and still be ugly.
My diplomas hung on the wall because the department expected it, not because I needed the reminder.
The bookshelves were full — journals, reference texts, three binders of patient data that my team was still coding.
A spider plant on the windowsill that Kinsey had given me when I moved in and that I kept alive out of spite.
And on the desk, next to my laptop and a mug of cold coffee, a photograph in a silver frame.
Fern at five months, propped against a pillow, dark eyes wide open, one fist wrapped around a stuffed rabbit.
Kinsey had taken it. I’d printed it the same day because it was the first photo where Fern looked like a person instead of a beautiful, bewildered potato, and I’d wanted it where I could see it during the long days when missing her was a physical ache in my chest.
I hadn’t moved the photograph. I’d thought about it — Saturday night, standing in the apartment with Fern asleep and Kinsey watching me from the couch. “You could just put it in the drawer for the day,” she’d said. “It’s not a betrayal. It’s a precaution.”
But moving it would have been an admission that I was expecting someone who shouldn’t see it, and I was not going to rearrange my life around Liam Buchanan anymore.
That was the old me — the woman who’d moved her career, her schedule, her entire identity to accommodate his world.
The new me had a lab and a daughter and a desk with a photograph on it, and if the board walked through my office during the tour, they would see a woman’s workspace — organized, lived-in, personal. There was nothing to hide.
I told myself that three times while I wiped down the spider plant’s leaves. I almost believed it by the third.
The board arrived at ten. Priya orchestrated the logistics — the five finalists rotated through their respective facility tours on a staggered schedule, so the board spent ninety minutes at each site over the course of two days.
Mine was the second stop on day one. I met them in the lobby of the Cambridge Institute for Translational Medicine, shook Hale’s hand, nodded at Dr. Metz, and led them down the corridor to the lab where my team was waiting.
The institute was modest by Buchanan standards.
No marble lobbies, no commissioned artwork in the hallways, no water features.
Just linoleum, fluorescent lights, and the faint chemical smell that clung to every building where real science happened.
I watched the board members register it as we walked — the subtle recalibration that occurred when people who lived in glass towers entered a space where the funding went into the work instead of the walls.
The tour was my territory, and I knew it.
I’d rehearsed without rehearsing — walked through it in my head while feeding Fern that morning, then again while driving in, then once more standing in the empty lab at eight-thirty arranging the sample displays.
My team had set up three stations: the biomarker assay, the computational modeling workstation, and the patient data visualization panel that showed real-time correlation tracking.
I walked the board through each station.
Explained the methodology in terms they could follow, flagged the decision points where the research got interesting, and stepped back to let my team answer the technical questions.
My postdoc, a quiet young man named Theo with wire-rimmed glasses and the focus of a monk, handled the assay explanation with a precision that made me proud.
My lab tech, Rosa, ran the data visualization demo with the ease of someone who could do it in her sleep, which she probably had.
The board was engaged. Hale asked follow-up questions that showed he’d been thinking about my presentation from Session One.
Metz made notes on a small pad she carried — actual handwritten notes, not the performative kind.
The golf-tan board member whose name I’d learned was Keith Lennox studied the data panel for a long time and said, “The pediatric application — how soon could this be in clinical trials with the right funding?”
“Eighteen months for the expanded cohort, twenty-four to thirty for a trial-ready protocol,” I said. “The grant would fund the critical gap — the bridge between the proof-of-concept data we have and the clinical-grade evidence the FDA needs.”
Lennox nodded. He didn’t look like a man who was easily impressed, and the nod wasn’t enthusiastic. But it was real.
And through all of it, Liam.
He stayed at the back of the group. That was the first thing I noticed — really noticed, not just tracked in my peripheral vision.
The old Liam would have been in the front row, asking the sharpest question, making sure the room knew the board chair’s son understood the science.
This Liam stood behind the other board members with his hands in his pockets and watched my team work with an expression I couldn’t read.
At the assay station, he studied the sample arrays with genuine attention.
Not the performative kind where you nod at intervals and ask a question designed to show you already know the answer.
He was learning. A man who ran a pharmaceutical empire was standing in my underfunded lab watching my twenty-six-year-old postdoc explain basic cytokine behavior, and he was paying attention like the explanation mattered more than the hierarchy.
During the assay walkthrough, Theo got flustered by a question from Hale about sample degradation rates.
It was a good question, a hard question, and Theo hadn’t been grilled by a board chair before.
He stammered, his hands going still over the slides in a way that telegraphed panic to anyone who’d spent time in a lab.
Before I could step in, Liam said, quietly, “Take your time. We’re here to learn, not to test you. ”
Theo took a breath, reorganized his thoughts, and delivered a clear answer that addressed both the degradation concern and the protocol adjustments that mitigated it. Hale looked satisfied. Liam moved back into the background without saying anything else.
He hadn’t directed. He hadn’t corrected.
He hadn’t done any of the things I’d watched him do for five years in boardrooms and galas and foundation meetings — the subtle redirection, the strategic nudge, the way he shaped conversations without anyone realizing he was doing it.
He had seen a young man struggling and made room for him. That was all.
I didn’t trust it.
People who wanted something back learned new tricks.
That was the thing about powerful men and apology — they studied it the way they studied markets, looking for the right investment of humility that would yield the maximum return.
Liam was a Buchanan, and Buchanans didn’t change.
They adapted. They identified what the situation required and they performed it until the world rearranged itself around their performance.
I had watched Roland do it for five years.
I had watched Liam learn it from him. The quiet deference, the careful listening, the stepping back — it could all be real.
It could also be the most sophisticated version of the same trick.
At the data panel, Rosa pulled up a real-time tracking screen that showed biomarker fluctuations in a twelve-patient sample cohort.
The curves moved on the display — slow rises and sudden drops, each one a body fighting a battle the patient didn’t know was coming yet.
The board leaned forward. I watched Liam.
His jaw was tight. Something about the display — the patients reduced to lines on a screen, each line a life — hit him differently than the other stations had.
“How early can you catch it?” he asked. His first question of the entire tour. Directed not at me but at Rosa, who was standing beside the panel.
“Current data shows a reliable predictive window of eleven to fourteen days before symptom onset,” Rosa said. “Dr. Keating’s model aims to push that to twenty-one.”
“Three weeks’ warning,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “That changes everything for a patient.”
“That’s the idea,” I said, before I could stop myself. Our eyes met for half a second. I looked away first.
The tour moved from the lab to the small conference room, where I’d set up a brief data walk-through on the screen.
Ten minutes of deep dive into the IL-6 correlation that Metz had flagged, specifically the pediatric arm.
Lennox’s question had confirmed her instinct — the pediatric application was the hook.
I laid it out clearly: the pattern, the potential, the timeline, the funding gap.
The room was quiet in the way that meant they were listening, not the way that meant they were bored.
When I finished, Metz caught my eye and gave a small nod. It was the same nod she’d given after the orientation — a verdict, not a compliment. She approved. I filed that away and didn’t let it show on my face.