Chapter Thirty-Three
Ashish
Am I ashamed that I find Bernie because she gave permission to my phone to find her location when we started training together?
Not even a little bit.
Stephen fucking Graham is her ex. I feel like an idiot. No wonder Gail looked at me like I wasn’t all there.
“You’re good with Graham?” she’d asked, and I was, before I realized he broke Bernie’s heart. Now I’m vacillating between wanting to punch the smug fucker in the face and panicking because if I had known exactly where she was positioned at Seattle State, I would have been more explicit in how I worked with Graham in the past. I don’t know what went down before she moved to Indiana, but it was enough to end a relationship—and I want nothing to do with it.
When Alan came back to the conference room to check on lunch, I knew something was wrong. I watched the clock, waiting for Bernie to reappear. Her phone said she was still in the building. Thirty minutes later, Graham walked in with a smug fucking look all over his face. He didn’t have to say anything; his eyes said it all.
I turn the corner and see light brown slacks stretched out on an ottoman in the corner. Bernie’s head hangs over the top of an armchair while she looks at the ceiling. Her laptop and phone are tucked into the side of the chair.
“Hey, sunshine,” I say softly, lifting her legs and resting them in my lap so I can sit in front of her.
“Hey,” she whispers.
She doesn’t pull away from me—but she doesn’t look at me either.
“Are you okay?”
I watch her chest rise in a deep breath, and she lets it out in a wheeze. “Is it true?”
I carefully circle her ankles with my hands, afraid to look at her. “Is what true?”
It’s the wrong thing to say because she pulls her legs from my lap and sits up.
“You’ve been working with Stephen? This whole time?” Each phrase is like a question, and I know she wants me to tell her that it’s not true.
When we walked into the conference room this morning and I saw Graham’s predatory eyes roaming over Bernie’s body like he owned her, I realized exactly which Stephen was her ex. Sitting through the morning meetings, I tried to remember everything Bernie had said about Graham. I remembered Gail’s comment, ‘ I’m surprised you didn’t consult with Bernie .’
She was surprised because Bernie had worked for Graham, and dread ran through me as I made the connections between Graham’s advice on the grant and Bernie’s research.
When she left the conference room, I panicked.
“I met with Graham a few times when I wrote the grant and added Seattle State as a collaborator,” I say slowly.
Bernie’s shaky breath fills the quiet space, and she steeples her fingers. I reach for her hands and thread her fingers through mine.
“What happened, Bernie?”
Her eyes are so fucking sad. Shiny with unshed tears. I watch as one spills over and rolls down her cheek. “He said he did everything because of you.”
“What did he do?”
“He ruined me, Ash. My dreams. And I know it’s not your fault, but he did it because of you .”
“I don’t understand.”
I met with Graham but I credited her work. I told her she inspired me. I can’t think of any way I haven’t been honest. I know the Graham stuff looks bad, but I didn’t go behind her back. I didn’t realize she worked in his office directly for him. Now it’s so obvious, I’m not really sure how I missed it.
“He pulled all of the work, Ashish. Because your grant made the university worry they were going to lose future money. The formula that Stephen shared with you to make your proposal more competitive was mine, and we were going to publish it, share it with everyone. Then he decided he could make money off of it, so he pulled all of my articles under review. It meant that I had nothing to show for my work during my postdoc.”
More tears escape, and I brush them away with my thumbs. “I don’t understand. It’s your work.”
She shakes her head. “Not my IP because, I was a postdoc.”
“I’m sorry, Bernie, I don’t think I’m following. I’ve never really worked in academia.”
She sniffles, trying to stem the tears. “You don’t get it. The whole point of a postdoc is to produce research—peer-reviewed journal articles. Research. Leaving a postdoc with no publications is like a death sentence. No research university would hire me. Even if the university made a bunch of money on the formula, without journal articles, it would look like I couldn’t do research. What university would hire me as an assistant professor if all I published was a co-authored white paper? That night, I realized Stephen didn’t love me when he put himself first. He sacrificed seven years of my work. My career. He told me that I was better off in a staff role, that I wasn’t meant to do independent research. I just didn’t have the talent.”
She folds over our hands, and I can feel her chest shuddering. “Please tell me you didn’t use me too. I can’t bear it. I feel like I’m losing everything again, and I don’t know what to do. How to get past it.”
“Bernie. Of course, I didn’t use you. I admired you. I reached out to Seattle State to work with you. This grant was an idea inspired by you.” Rubbing my hands over her back, I just want to fix it. Do something.
She cries harder, and I panic, scrambling to say anything to make it better. Work is Bernie’s safe place. We just need to get through today and then we can fix it.
“We should—we can go back and finish this and figure it out. Is that okay?”
Her body stiffens, and I immediately know I fucked up. I should have just bundled her up in my arms and carried her away from this fucking place.
She sits up slowly and withdraws her hands from mine, wiping her cheeks. Her pale face is mottled with red. Averting her eyes, I feel her withdrawing from me, putting distance between us as she collects her things.
Fuck, fuck. Standing with her, I reach out to rest my hand on her lower back. She flinches at the touch, so I drop it. She starts moving and I follow, walking slightly behind her because the aisle between the shelves is so narrow—books almost to the ceiling making me feel claustrophobic.
She stops at the bathroom, and I pace over the worn blue carpet, mind racing. When she emerges, her face is scrubbed free of makeup. She sniffles, and I notice her neck is red and the edge of her collar is damp, like she was scrubbing there.
We walk silently through the Quad, pale pink petals floating from the trees overhead, bruised under our feet.
Everything in me is screaming that going back to that conference room is a mistake. That I need to tug Bernie in my arms and protect her from whatever fucking poison Graham was feeding her. Before we enter the building, I grab her hand and steer her to the side of the door.
“We don’t have to go back in there, Bernie.” I hesitate before wrapping my arms around her. “I can go get our stuff, make excuses. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“You were right, we need to finish this. It would be unprofessional to just leave.”
I hate how sad she sounds. I hate I can’t fix this, that I don’t know how and I don’t really fully understand what’s wrong.
“Who fucking cares? I don’t care. I just care about you.” The more I think about it, the more I desperately want to get her away from that fucker. She presses her nose into my neck and draws in a long breath. Just her touching me eases my growing panic.
“I do. I need to finish it.”
She steps out of my arms and goes through the door.
***
Bernadette Murphy is fucking majestic. I watch her navigate slides for the next hour, describing the MOU process and the successes and challenges of selecting a community partner at this stage in the Lafayette project. She pulls up a slide I haven’t seen yet that shows a comparison of the MIT and Lafayette projects, drawing attention to their similarities and highlighting the opportunity to diversify the types of projects students could do by picking a different type of engineering lab or cross-collaborating with another academic unit to bring more dimension to the work.
Graham watches her the entire time, but she doesn’t look in his direction. She doesn’t really look in mine either, and my concern grows.
She fields the faculty’s questions and makes recommendations for how to improve their future cohort. I don’t know if any of the faculty noticed that she was upset when she came back into the room, but Graham sure did. He’d surveyed her then locked eyes with me and smiled.
Smiled .
When we finished, Bernie shook everyone’s hand—even Graham’s—before marching out of the conference room. Mike lingered, causally chatting with the Seattle faculty, leaving and Graham and me behind.
“Mishra.”
“Graham.”
He stretches his hand out, palm up, indicating I should walk through the door.
“After you.”
“What did you say to Bernie?”
His eyebrow shoots up, and he shrugs. “I think conversations between me and my partner aren’t any of your business.”
“Are you delusional?”
He shrugs again, and I want to punch him in his smug face. “It’s none of your business. It has nothing to do with you. You’re just a consultant.”
“Everything to do with Bernie is my business.” I step closer to him. “Tell me why she was upset.”
“Hmm, not sure. I just talked about how we’d collaborated on the proposal and pointed out how much your firm benefited from the award.” He tilts his head to the side. “What did you make on this? Half a million?”
“What are you talking about?”
Graham turns toward the conference table and picks up his notebook. “I should really thank you, Dr. Mishra. Without you, I wouldn’t have realized the potential of Bernadette’s postdoc work. I’m sure in the end, we’ll both benefit from it.”
He shrugs again, and the meaning of Bernie’s words starts to sink in.
‘ He ruined me…he did it because of you.’
I pass Graham in the hallway and find Bernie and Mike waiting for me in front of the elevators. Her face is carefully blank, and nervous energy rushes through me. We step onto the elevator, and I reach for Bernie’s hand, holding her cold fingers in mine. She doesn’t stop me, but her fingers are limp. Mike asks if we have plans for dinner, and I tell him we’re meeting Bernie’s mom. She sits in the rideshare quietly as we go to the hotel, occasionally answering Mike’s questions about Seattle.
In the hotel room, I watch her slowly strip off her clothes and crawl under the covers. Her back is to me when I slide in behind her, holding her to my chest. I remember my dad patting my shoulder and explaining that it’s okay to cry.
‘ Beta, sometimes we tell people not to cry not because we want them to feel better but because we’re uncomfortable with their tears. All you can do is be with them, help them weather the storm.’
It’s hard because all I want to do is fix this. It’s what I should have done earlier.
I want Bernie to talk to me. Promise it’s going to be okay. I try to push down the fear and just be there for her—solid and steady. When dinner gets closer, I unlock Bernie’s phone and tell her Mom we can’t make it. She’d fallen asleep, and I didn’t want to wake her. Instead, I curl my body around hers and wait.