She took a few calming breaths and scrubbed at her cheeks. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. It’s nothing.”
His mouth thinned. “You’d never cry if it was nothing. So tell me.”
Shetriednot to. She hadn’t even told her mother yet. But somehow, the confession leapt from her like it was jumping ship to freedom. “If you really want to know, I lost my job, okay? Mydreamjob. That’s why I’m here. Because I couldn’t afford my place in New York anymore. And I had nowhere else to go.”
His brows lowered. “Lost your job?You?That... doesn’t sound right.”
“Yeah, well.Loseisn’t really the right word. It was more like someone stole it from me.”
“What?” The air around him thickened. Darkened. “How?”
She sniffled and pinned her focus to the facts. Facts were simple. Quantifiable. “It’s complicated, but... you know I’m a mathematician, right?”
“Yeah. Though to be honest, I don’t know what that actually means.”
“It means I work with patterns. Figure out how to measure and make sense of them. Kind of like solving a puzzle. And ever since I finished my PhD, I’d been working for a company called Osos. We... orthey, I should say... manage paired kidney donation.”
Nick shook his head as if she’d spoken Greek. “Kidney... what? Like transplants?”
“Yeah.” She swiped at her nose with a hand. She probably looked like a mess. A fact that shouldn’t bother her as much as it did.
“What does that have to do with math?”
She smiled faintly. It was a common enough question. “A lot. Paired kidney donation is for transplant recipients who have willing donors that can’t donate to them directly, for whatever reason. Their blood type doesn’t match, or some other incompatibility. So Osos figures out who the donorwillmatch with and arranges a swap. As in, A’s donor gives their kidney to B, and B’s donor gives their kidney to A. Everyone goes home happy.”
He did a slow blink. “Wow. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Could you do a three-way exchange?”
Her breath caught. She’d explained this process to laymen countless times, but none had ever grasped the implications as quickly as he just had. “Yeah, and that’s where the math comes in. You can do a three-way swap, or four. Theoretically, if you could write a powerful enough algorithm, you could build a whole daisy chain of transplants. A’s donor gives to B, B’s donor gives to C, C’s donor gives to D, on and on until it circles back to A. But it takes a lot of data and a lot of math to figure out the best way to do that. To maximize the number of transplants and minimize the chances of organ rejection.”
“Sothat’swhat you’ve been doing all these years?” He sounded awed. “Saving people’s lives? With math?”
“Well,” she said. “Yes.”
“That’s fucking incredible.”
“Like I said.” She sniffled. “It was my dream job.”
His breath caught and held. “That someone stole from you.”
“Yeah.”
“Buthow?” Acid coated his words.
She searched for something that might occupy her hands and settled on her tea. The mug gifted her palms with warmth. How Nick had goaded her into sharing, she couldn’t say, but confessing to someone at last felt like shedding a steel weight. “Well, for the past year, I’d been working on a project on the side. Our biggest limitation with building daisy chains is that the pool of donors is only so large. A lot of the registries are regional, which means someone in New York might match with someone in North Dakota, but we’d never know because the donor pools are fragmented. So I built a program that could compare data across regions, then came up with an algorithm that would wade through all that information and build prospective swaps.Bigones. It effectively knit a whole bunch of smaller databases into a national one, and made the match process way more powerful. But I kept it secret, because the company awards a prize every year, the Innovation Cup. Whoever does the most to help the company wins a two-week vacation, plus a trophy, and this was going to be my year to win. The first timeanywoman would’ve won in ten years. Except when I finished my algorithm, I made the mistake of telling a coworker about it.BeforeI told my boss.”
Nick’s eyes slitted. “And let me guess. That coworker took the credit?”
“Yeah.” Heat prickled at her throat again, but she tamed it. “He took me out for drinks, supposedly to celebrate, thenswiped my thumb drive and brought everything to my boss. And when I tried to explain, this guy accused me of trying to stealhiswork. I... didn’t handle it well. I freaked out. Which looked bad. It made me seem guilty, and it was a death sentence for my career.”
Nick’s fingers curled into fists. “Who was this guy, exactly? What was his name?”
She raked her gaze over him. Uh-oh. She knew that look. “It doesn’t matter. It’s my problem. That’s the other reason I’m here—to write an appeal that’ll convince my boss that nobody but me could’ve created that algorithm.”
He considered. “That sounds time-consuming.”
“Things worth doing usually are.”
“Or you could just tell me this asshole’s name.”
