Possibly, but she’d gotten home by eight o’clock after only one glass of wine, since Martina was due at SVLAC for her brutal shift soon after their meetup, while she herself would be cycling to the campus not much later. She couldn’t still be tipsy. She shuffled out of bed on legs that wobbled only a little, across the dark living room, and into the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face.
Easy, Monaghan.
The next splash verged on a slap. Only one person called her “Monaghan” in that mocking—though not usually so breathless—voice.
“No. Wake up,” she told her reflection.
Maybe this was just the product of a disrupted sleep schedule. Weird dreams and hallucinations. A nightmare about fleece and data and—him.
Or could her conversation with Martina have triggered it?
She wondered, brushing her teeth until her gums stung, then pulling back her hair into a tight French braid. Even though she wouldn’t be responsible for manually manipulating machinery during her lab hours, loose hair in the experimental halls was never a good idea. In the bathroom’s unflattering light, her eyes were puffy, her skin blotched.
Not that it mattered.
She padded back to her bedroom, shook wrinkles from the jeans and graphic Sally Ride t-shirt that she’d set out earlier—the dress code in the halls was even more casual than SVLAC’s usual mode—and got ready.
11:31 p.m.
Then, with a salute to her posters, which featured prominent women in science and literature, acknowledging that all of them had certainly braved worse hours (though probably not such bizarre dreams), she grabbed her steel-toed work boots and headed for the kitchen.
At Left Bank, they’d discussed Martina’s latest daylight community activism efforts on behalf of Menlo Park’s small businesses; decades-old family operations now came under threat from commercial developers and heavyweight lawyers in San Francisco with increasing frequency. They’d also discussed Ethan Meyer some more. She’d known that their vendetta was an open secret at SVLAC. Neither of them had tried to conceal it. Especially not yesterday. However, she’d assumed that Human Resources had intentionally left them to their own devices, believing that the excellent research that they each produced in consequence of their rivalry was the reason that neither had been burdened with mediation sessions.
Now, though?
As she shoved a few energy bars and a milky cold brew coffee into her backpack, a new thought surfaced: maybe… just maybe… their research results weren’t the reason that Human Resources hadn’t reprimanded them.
Clapping.
Popcorn.
Was their rivalryentertainingto their colleagues?
Why?
She shrugged into her jacket at the door with a frown and stomped into her boots, then shouldered her bicycle down the stairs in the flickering glow of Live Oak Avenue’s street lamps. She pushed off from the pavement, tires wheezing against the cool roadway. Every stroke of her pedals repeated the question.
Why? Why? Why?
But it didn’t matter. She’d dealt with worse than Ethan’s hostility in graduate school: an assistant professor attempting to publish elements of her pre-LIGO work on the behavior of gravity as his own, or colleagues in her research group conveniently forgetting to list her among the authors on a collaborative paper that described comet orbits in the Oort cloud. As the sole woman, she’d seen the warning signs and hit back proactively and hard before any threats against her could solidify from risks to outcomes. She’d had to.
And now, a physicist at a National Lab, slated to manage her department while her supervisor was on leave—and a woman in STEM?
Shecouldn’tback down.
Couldn’t be easy.
Bumping over a scattering of gravel too fast, skidding through her turn, pivoting hard away from that thought, she swung onto Middle Avenue, sped along Olive Street, and up Oak Avenue to its intersection with Sand Hill Road. She wiped a film of sweat from her chin and unzipped her jacket at the stoplight, glad to glare at the red glow ahead, to focus on a simpler adversary than her own brain.
God, it was dark.
Maybe she’d include something in her next story about the crushing physical and psychological weight of getting up without light? Regardless of the hour, though, she couldn’t afford to be late for her start in the West Experimental Hall. Ethan wouldn’t grant her even a moment of grace if she ran over her allotted research block.
He never would’ve urged her to beeasyabout anything.
Just a hallucination.
The traffic light switched to green. She pedaled through the intersection, past SVLAC’s security booth, and along Ring Road to the experimental halls. Her watch—an analog beauty from Wes with two timekeeping faces, so that she could always track the time where he was, no matter how far away—showed its California hands pointing to eleven fifty-five.
