Lewis, seemingly unaware of the question, uses his foot to shift the student’s backpack, which sports a Stanford logo.
“Um?”
“I lost something,” Lewis says. His eyes jump to mine, then the student, who seems to realize we haven’t listened to him at all. Lewis clears his throat, glancing up at the poster. “So. Uh.” His eyes squint together. “You really think you can detect hippocampal theta with EEG?”
As they discuss, I peer down the aisle of poster boards as far as I can, but when Lewis is still discussing with the student ten minutes later, I excuse myself. I can’t tell if he wants to make up for our rudeness, or if he’s actually interested, but I know we’ll be quicker if we split up.
I’m about a third of the way down the room, in front of a poster that, in other circumstances, I’d find much more interesting, when Rosanna Alderkamp walks up next to me.
“Frances, how are you?”
The poster’s author is nowhere to be seen. I’m kneeling to see if the notebook fell behind the paper bin pushed against the wall. A second later and she would’ve found me with my hand inside that bin.
“Oh, hi,” I chirp and retie the laces of my left shoe, pretending that’s what I crouched down for.
“Did you have a nice weekend?”
It takes me a moment to answer. After the mad search that has made up this last hour, the weekend feels like it happened years ago. “I did.” I straighten. “What about you?”
She gives me a tired smile. “Too warm, but my wife flew in on Friday and we rented a car and went to a beach in New Jersey, so it was manageable.”
“Yeah, the summers here are a little different from the ones in the Netherlands,” I say. Which reminds me that, once I’m back in Europe, this might be my last summer in the Netherlands… unless I bookmark the search for a moment and try my luck with her. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Would you still be up for having lunch at some point this week?”
“Sure. Let me check.” Rosanna rummages through her bag, and after she finds her phone, she lifts her glasses to the top of her forehead and taps on her screen. “Thank you for sending me the code, by the way. Is tomorrow okay?”
Other than my data-blitz presentation on Thursday morning, the final social event of the Sawyer’s on the same evening, and finding this goddamn notebook, I have nothing scheduled for the week, so I nod. “Works for me. Shall we meet outside the building after tomorrow’s keynote?”
“Let’s do that.” She puts her phone away and brushes her hair over one shoulder. “There’s this café on Broadway I walk past every morning on the way here that I’ve been wanting to try.”
“That sounds good,” I chime. Honestly, we could be having stale store-bought chips on a bench somewhere and I’d still be happy I get to talk to her.
Rosanna gives me a small wave. “See you then.”
As she walks away, my worries about the missing notebook immediately burst back up and I tell myself it’ll be fine, that it won’t turn up in unwanted hands, that nobody will read what’s inside, and I’ll get to meet Rosanna and make my case for how well I would fit into her lab if she has any available funding.
Lewis comes to find me not long after, and as we continue our search, Jacob stops us on the way to the seminar rooms. He asks us about our weekend, and through our jumpy, nervous replies, I wait for him to casually announce that he’s found the notebook, but he only turns to Lewis and says, “Dr. North, could you resend your lecture slides from last week? I think there’s something wrong with the file,” before he wishes us a good rest of the day.
With Lewis tense against my side, and my breaths shaky, I steer us out of the building, across the plaza, and into the shade of a leafy tree away from view.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“What for?”
“We wouldn’t be in this mess if I hadn’t insisted on this whole charade.”
“Yeah, but you’d also still be hating my guts.” Lewis runs a hand through his hair, his mouth curving into a hollow smile. “This one is on me. We wouldn’t be in this mess if I didn’t need to write everything down.”
But hearing him take the blame doesn’t make me feel any better. “What about the rest of the notebook?” I ask. “Not… related to us, but is there anything else in there that’d suck if it was gone?”
“Maybe the last few pages. Everything I wrote down since we arrived, but in comparison, that doesn’t really matter…”
He doesn’t need to finish his sentence.
We both know that if we are found out, our careers might well be over.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lewis’s notebook remains missing. After checking with Regina again and dipping into the remaining seminar rooms that were locked earlier today, we give up on our search, trudging back from campus in silence. Lewis heads off to dinner with his brother, and I try to keep myself distracted for the rest of the evening by reading through all the emails that came in over the weekend and doing laundry. On the way back from the laundromat, I pick up a salad for dinner and a tub of vegan Van Leeuwen ice cream.
