Chapter 1

"Honestly, Ian, my advisor isn't even human!"

Emily Carrigan rolled over on the couch with a throw pillow in her arms. She yelled into it face-down before flipping back upward. Kicking her legs straight out, she launched into a rant that sounded like she was complaining about the universe's injustice.

Her wailing was loud enough to drown out the TV in the living room, but Ian Sutherland didn't even look up. He was pinning a sea bass to the chopping board and running a knife down its spine.

The cut was neat; bone and flesh parted in one stroke. He slid the fillets onto a plate and set them aside.

He'd been listening to Emily start rants with the same opening line every day for a whole week now. From "the devil incarnate" to "cold-blooded robot" and "academic tyrant", his little sister could come up with a new nickname for her graduate advisor daily.

Emily pushed herself upright and sat cross-legged on the couch. She propped the pillow up vertically and grabbed it by the "throat", clearly using it as a stand-in for some unspeakable urge.

"I did an entire literature review for today's group meeting. It was 30,000 words. 30,000! I spent four whole days slaving over that thing. But she picked it up, flipped through two pages, then pointed at the year in one of the parentheses in the third paragraph and asked me…"

Emily cleared her throat, dropped her voice, and copied her advisor's cool, frosty tone. "'Emily, this person got the Aurora Prize for Literature in 2012, not 2013. Do you think history just bends around your whims, or that the Aurora Committee should adjust their records to match your memory?'"

When she finished mimicking her advisor, she buried her face in the pillow and let out a muffled groan. "I died right there in front of all seven people in the group. My social credit is wiped out now. Lauren tried so hard not to laugh that her shoulders shook, and Brandon pretended to look at his phone when the screen was black!"

The corners of Ian's mouth tugged almost imperceptibly, but he didn't respond. He finished arranging the fish slices and started preparing the sauce.

"Aren't you going to comfort me at all?" Emily protested.

"The year was wrong. Maybe you can try asking the Aurora Committee to accommodate you," he said.

"You're laughing at me, too! Are you really my brother?"

Ian turned off the burner, put the steamer on the stove, and finally glanced at her. "I definitely am. That's why I'm telling you that if you mess up, you fix it. Don't be such a drama queen."

Emily glared at him for a couple of seconds, then pouted. She knew there was no way to squeeze any semblance of gentleness out of this brick wall of an older brother.

But she clearly wasn't done venting. She suddenly lowered her voice, her anger giving way to glee as her eyes lit up. "But you know what? I discovered a huge secret today."

She scooted over to the kitchen doorway and lowered her voice even further. "My advisor is a total genius when it comes to academic research. Her publications are so good that even her own advisor brags about her, but she's a total idiot when it comes to real life and life skills."

Ian added water into the steamer and gave a half-hearted grunt.

"This afternoon, she put the lab coats to wash in the lab laundry room. Guess what she did? She dumped an entire bottle of dish soap into the front-loading washer. The whole thing! Like one of those giant catering-size jugs!"

Ian's hand faltered.

"The entire lab balcony filled up with foam. It was spilling out of the windows. People walking down the third-floor hallway thought there was a fire and came running. Our whole group spent half an hour on our knees, scraping foam off the floor.

"Meanwhile, she just stood there with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She didn't even have sweat on her face, and she was totally calm as she said…"

Emily slipped back into that cool, aloof tone. "'It says heavy-duty degreaser on the label. How is that different from laundry detergent? They're both for washing.'"

She burst into laughter and doubled over, almost sliding down the doorframe.

Ian didn't laugh. His hand hovered in midair while holding the lid of the steamer, his knuckles tightened until they went white.

The scene Emily had described was far too familiar.

In the fall of their sophomore year, his ex-girlfriend, Cynthia Lynch, had tried doing her own laundry for the first time. It was her first weekend living in a place off campus after moving out of the dorm.

She'd squeezed half a bottle of hand soap into the washing machine, with the exact same reasoning. "They're both for washing. What's the difference?"

He remembered crouching on the balcony, pushing lakes of foam around with a mop, while she stood next to him handing him rags, the tips of her ears red. She refused to admit she was wrong and muttered, "The packaging design is misleading."

He'd teased her about it for three days straight.

"And she's got stomach issues." Emily dropped onto a chair at the dining table, crossing one leg over the other. "Halfway through the afternoon meeting, she suddenly went pale. Her forehead was covered in cold sweat. I was next to her, so I saw everything. Her left hand was pressed over her stomach the whole time, for like ten minutes."

Ian faltered again while undoing the knot on his apron.

"I asked in a whisper whether she'd eaten anything, and she told me she'd had an iced black coffee that morning. So then I asked why she'd taken something iced when she knew she had stomach issues. She just looked at me without answering."

Emily shuddered. "I don't even want to remember that look. But I later asked Lauren about it, and she said our advisor wasn't always like this. She used to drink warm milk every morning and even brought her own thermal flask.

"It's only in the last year or two that she switched to iced black coffees, and it's already made her gastritis flare up a bunch of times. Nobody knows why she changed, and no one dares to ask."

Ian didn't say anything. He took off the apron, hung it up, washed his hands, and walked into the living room. He sat down, grabbed the remote, and flipped to a different channel. He had no idea what was playing.

Cynthia had stomach problems, too. Back in their junior year, he'd nursed her stomach back to health, bit by bit.

She'd just gotten her first paper accepted to a top journal. For a whole month, she'd slept maybe three or four hours a night, lived on three iced coffees a day, and ended up in the campus clinic with a bleeding ulcer.

When he got the call and rushed over, she was lying on the bed with an IV in her arm, her face as white as a sheet. The second she saw him, she still tried to tough it out and play it off as nothing, even saying that she could go home the next day to revise her draft.

From that day on, he set his alarm for 6:00 am daily to heat up milk for her. No sugar because she hated anything too sweet, and the temperature had to be between 122°F and 131°F. Too hot and she wouldn't drink it; too cool and it would hurt her stomach.

He stuck to it for a year, rain or shine, until her symptoms finally stopped coming back.

Ian tapped the remote again. The channel switched to a cooking show. He stared at the screen for a few seconds, then suddenly lost interest and turned the TV off.

There were plenty of people in the world with sensitive stomachs and zero life skills. Not every woman who poured dish soap into a washing machine was Cynthia Lynch.

What were the odds?

…

At 11:00 pm, Ian stepped out of the shower and was about to turn off the lights and go to bed when Emily's bedroom door flew open with a bang. She barreled out into the hallway, looking even more stricken than she had when her advisor had chewed her out earlier.

"Ian, I'm screwed!" she cried.

"What happened?"

"I have to present my data tomorrow at 8:00 am, and all the important files are on the lab's external hard drive." She clutched at her hair, so frantic that she was practically spinning in circles. "I left it in the resource room when I left today!"

Ian frowned. "Then go back and get it now."

"It's too late! They lock the doors at 10:00 pm, and the key to the room is with Lauren. She doesn't get to campus until 7:00 am. And the resource room is a bit of a hike from our classroom. I have to be in the classroom by 7:00 am to set up my slides, fix the figures, and format everything. I won't have time to run back and forth."

Emily pressed her palms together like she was praying. Her eyes were red, and she sounded like she was on the verge of tears. "Ian, can you please grab it for me tomorrow morning and get it to me before 7:50 am? I'm begging you! If you don't help me, I'm literally dead. My advisor is gonna eat me alive!"

"Where am I taking it?" Ian asked.

"Third floor of the humanities building. Room 312." Emily rattled off the address in a rush, terrified he might change his mind. "Just come to the door and yell my name. I'll be waiting there."

Ian hesitated for a few seconds. The third floor of the humanities building… He'd waited for Cynthia outside that old gray-and-white building more times than he could count, sitting on the bench downstairs. In the summer, he would buy her popsicles. In the winter, he'd have something warm waiting.

He remembered the west-facing windows on the third floor, the ones where she always sat near the glass reading—he could sketch her silhouette from memory with his eyes closed.

"Okay," he said.

"Thank you! You're the best brother on the planet! Ever!" Emily launched herself at him, gave him a quick hug, and practically bounced back to her room.

Ian turned off the lights and lay down in bed. He told himself he was just delivering a hard drive. It would take three minutes, tops. He would get there at 7:50 am, hand Emily the drive, and walk away.

There were lots of classrooms on the third floor. 312 was just a room number.

He wouldn't run into anyone. He wouldn't.