Type II Error

Chapter One

Adam

He wakes at 5:40, because his body has never once in thirty-four years let him sleep past six, and for the first few seconds he doesn't know where he is.

Then he does. Hotel. Boston. Window with the blackout curtain pulled only halfway, so a grey stripe of morning lies across the carpet and over a crumpled black T-shirt that says BIOLOGY NINJA in white letters. One rainbow knee sock, inside out, on the lamp. He has no idea how it got on the lamp. He has a feeling he put it there.

And Olive.

She's on her stomach in his bed, face mashed into his pillow, one arm hooked under it and the other flung across the mattress toward where he was lying until a minute ago. Her hair is everywhere. There's a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase, and her mouth is a little open, and she is, objectively, drooling a tiny bit, and Adam stands at the foot of the bed in his boxers and thinks that he would let someone cut off a hand if it meant he could stay in this room.

He doesn't, obviously. Stay. He has a 9 a.m. with the Harvard search committee, a breakfast before it that he was supposed to remember the name of, and a suit hanging in the closet that he's going to have to put on in the dark like a burglar. You don't have to wake me up when you leave, she said last night, sometime after two, and he isn't going to argue with something she asked for while lying on his chest.

He showers fast. He doesn't sing, because he never sings, but there's a moment under the water where he catches himself almost smiling at the tile, like a lunatic, and has to stop. When he comes out the room smells like her, that sugary drugstore shampoo and sleep, and the smell gets into his lungs and stays there.

He dresses. Watch. Badge, which he leaves on the desk, because he's done being the keynote speaker and the thought of having his name on a lanyard at a job interview makes him want to throw up. Charger. He looks for it behind the lamp for half a minute, gives up, and decides that losing a phone charger is a fair price.

Before he goes, he does something stupid.

He crouches by the bed, the way he crouched by her chair yesterday when he found her crying, and just looks at her. The freckles. The little half-moon scar by her temple, from a Toronto snowstorm when she was four and a stone hiding under the first drift she dove into. She told him the story last night in her mother's words, and he listened like it was classified.

Her left arm is above the covers. On the back of the upper arm, where it's softest, there are marks. Four of them, faint and reddish, already going the color of a bad plum at the edges.

He'd noticed them last night. Kissed them, actually, without thinking, somewhere between the first time and the second, and she had flinched. Hard. Then laughed and said, Poster stand. I walked into one after my talk. I'm a menace to conference infrastructure. And he had believed her, because she is a menace, because last week she walked into the glass door of the Starbucks and apologized to it.

He looks at the marks now, in the grey light, and something cold and small turns over at the back of his mind.

Four. Spaced like that.

Then Olive makes a noise into the pillow, a sleepy, offended sound, and pulls the duvet up over her shoulder like she can feel him staring, and the thought slides away before he can catch it. He'll ask her tonight. He'll ask her about a lot of things tonight.

You're not going to ask her anything, says the part of his brain that has kept him alive through a PhD and two R01 renewals. You're going to buy her dinner and try hard not to say the thing.

He pulls the curtain the rest of the way shut so the light won't wake her. He hangs the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Then he goes to Harvard.

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