The boardroom on the ninth floor had been designed to make scientists feel like they were worth the investment. Floor-to-ceiling windows framing the harbor. Italian leather chairs that cost more than Maren's first year of student loans. A conference table made of reclaimed teak from a decommissioned yacht this detail was mentioned in the building's welcome brochure, which Maren had read once and remembered because she found it obscene in a specific and instructive way.
She stood at the head of the table with her presentation on the screen behind her and eighteen faces in front of her and tried to project the particular kind of confidence that boards of directors required from their scientists: certain enough to inspire investment, humble enough to suggest rigor, just nervous enough to appear human.
She was, in fact, nervous. Not because of the data the data was pristine. Not because of the two funeral reports, which she had decided were anomalies and which she had not mentioned in her slides. She was nervous because Lena had told her, that morning, that the board was "leaning toward accelerated timeline" for the FDA filing, which meant that the people in this room the CFO with his silver pen, the chief medical officer with her careful frown, the three outside directors she'd met exactly twice were not here to be persuaded. They were here to be reassured. And reassurance, unlike data, required performance.
"Phase III results at the eight-month mark continue to exceed our primary endpoints," Maren said, advancing a slide. A graph appeared: two curves, treatment and placebo, diverging like roads that had once been the same. "Total sleep time in the treatment group increased an average of 3.6 hours over placebo. Sleep efficiency reached 89 percent. These numbers hold across all demographic subgroups and all three dosage tiers."
She paused. Let the graph breathe. Tomás had told her once that she presented data the way other people read eulogies with the affectless precision of someone who had decided to feel later. She'd thanked him and he'd looked confused.
"Adverse events remain within expected parameters. The most commonly reported are headache 12 percent dry mouth 8 percent and vivid dreaming 6 percent. No serious adverse events have been attributed to the drug."
She did not mention the funeral memory reports. She had decided not to. They were two data points in a trial of eight hundred subjects, and the severity assessment was Low, and the incident-report form had been filed, and the monitoring schedule had been noted, and there was a process and she had followed it. She told herself this with the fluency of someone who had been practicing.
The chief medical officer Dr. Anne Whitford, a woman with short grey hair and the demeanor of someone who had survived pharmaceutical regulation the way some people survive war asked about the REM modulation mechanism.
Maren answered. She answered well. She answered with the part of her brain that could explain hippocampal consolidation to a roomful of MBAs without condescending, which was a skill she had developed late and imperfectly and was still, frankly, proud of.
Then Lena stepped in.
She rose from her seat at the side of the table not the head, never the head; Lena positioned herself as the bridge between the science and the money, which was geographically and metaphorically accurate and translated Maren's dense neuroscience into the language the room actually spoke.
"What Dr. Shaw is saying," Lena said, and her voice had a warmth that filled the room the way good lighting fills a room, evenly and from no single visible source, "is that Somniplex-R doesn't just help people fall asleep. It teaches the brain how to sleep correctly. Think of it as a tutor, not a sedative. The implications for chronic insomnia, for PTSD-related sleep disorder, for age-related cognitive decline are generational."
The board leaned forward. The CFO uncapped his silver pen.
Maren watched Lena work the room and felt something she didn't often feel: admiration that was also jealousy. Lena made it look effortless the charm, the calibration, the way she landed on exactly the word a venture-backed mind needed to hear. Maren could build the science. Lena could make people believe in it. Together they were, as Lena had once said after a champagne-fueled celebration of Phase II results, "a complete organism."
The board approved the accelerated filing timeline. There was applause. Lena caught Maren's eye across the room and gave her a small, private nod the kind of gesture shared between two people who believe they are building something important.
• •
Afterward, they went to a bar.
Not a Sollen-approved celebration this was just the two of them, in a narrow, low-lit place near South Station that served expensive whiskey in glasses the size of thimbles. The kind of bar where academic women with imposter syndrome could feel, briefly, like they belonged to the winning side of the world.
Maren ordered bourbon. Lena ordered gin. They sat in a booth with cracked leather seats and a candle that smelled like department-store vanilla, which was not Maren's preference but which she tolerated because Lena liked this bar and Maren, at this point in her life, liked very little outside of her lab and her daughter, and adding Lena to that list felt like growth.
"You were excellent today," Lena said.
"I was adequate. You were excellent."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"The thing where you diminish yourself before someone else can." Lena sipped her gin. "You built this drug, Maren. You. Not a team, not a committee you. Own it."
Maren looked at her glass. The bourbon was the color of old varnish, and she could see the bar's single light reflected in it, warped into something that looked like a small, trapped sun. "I had a question about the anomaly reports "
"The funeral thing?"
"Two independent subjects, same imagery. That's not nothing."
"It's not nothing," Lena agreed. "But it's not something either. Not yet. You filed the reports?"
"Yes."
"Monitoring escalated?"
"Yes."
"Then you've done what the protocol requires." Lena leaned forward. In the candlelight, her face was all angles strong jaw, clever eyes, the bergamot-and-metal scent of her perfume cutting through the vanilla. "Maren, I'm going to say something that I mean as a compliment, and I need you to hear it that way. You are the most rigorous scientist I have ever worked with. But rigor, past a certain point, becomes self-sabotage. You're so afraid of missing a flaw that you'll invent one if you can't find one. And right now, six weeks before the FDA meeting, the most dangerous thing you can do is go looking for a problem that isn't there."
Maren wanted to argue. She wanted to say that two matching anomalies in a population of eight hundred wasn't invention, it was observation, and that observation was her job. But the bourbon was warm in her chest and Lena's voice had the quality of a room you didn't want to leave, and the argument softened in her mouth and came out instead as: "You're probably right."
"I usually am." Lena smiled. "Tell me about Alma."
And Maren did. She talked about the whale drawing and the rain boots and the theory about pigeons, and Lena listened with what appeared to be genuine delight, asking follow-up questions that suggested she remembered previous details Maren had shared Alma's fear of the dark, her preference for penne over spaghetti, the name of her imaginary friend (Clover, a rabbit who lived in the walls). It felt like friendship. It felt like the kind of conversation Maren used to have before the divorce, before the lab consumed her schedule, before she'd begun to suspect that she'd traded fluency in human connection for fluency in neural oscillation.
She got on the train at nine-fifteen feeling lighter than she had in weeks. She replayed the conversation on the ride home, the way she replayed data sets examining it from multiple angles, testing it for consistency. Lena's warmth. Lena's counsel. Lena's gentle redirection away from the anomaly reports.
It wasn't until she was unlocking her front door that she realized she couldn't recall exactly how the conversation had shifted from the funeral reports to Alma. She remembered Lena saying you've done what the protocol requires and she remembered talking about Alma's pigeon theory, but the transition between those two moments was smooth in a way that felt curated rather than organic the conversational equivalent of a jump cut.
She stood in the hallway, keys in hand, and tried to locate the missing beat. It should have been there a bridge sentence, a change of topic, the small social machinery of two people pivoting from work to life. But there was only the gap, smooth and seamless, as though someone had edited the tape.
She shook her head. She was tired. She was always tired.
She went inside. Checked the lock twice. Changed into a faded MIT sweatshirt and pajama pants. Brushed her teeth. Stood in the kitchen for a moment, looking at the refrigerator Alma's drawings held up by pharmacy magnets, a takeout menu for a Thai place she never ordered from, a calendar with David's weekends marked in blue and then she opened the refrigerator door and stood there, lit by the cold interior light, unable to remember why.
She was looking for something. She was sure she'd come in here with a purpose a specific item, a specific hunger. But the thought had evacuated, cleanly and completely, like a file deleted from a desktop.
She closed the door. Poured a glass of water. Drank it standing at the sink.
Tired, she told herself. Just tired.
The radiator clanked. The pipes muttered. Outside, a car alarm started and stopped, a single electronic bleat in the dark. Maren put the glass in the sink and went to bed, and as she lay there waiting for sleep to come always waiting, always the student and never the teacher she thought about Lena's perfume. Bergamot and something underneath. A metal note, like a key that doesn't fit the lock but slides in anyway.
She slept. She dreamed of nothing she would remember.
But in the morning, getting dressed, she would find herself reaching for a sweater she didn't own a green cardigan she could picture clearly, hanging on the back of her closet door and she would stand there for a full ten seconds, arm extended toward an empty hook, before her brain caught up with her hand and told her: that isn't yours.
She would blame exhaustion. She would go to work. She would not mention it to anyone.
The green cardigan would not be mentioned again for seven chapters. But it had been mentioned now, and somewhere in the architecture of her sleeping mind, a door had opened that she did not yet know was a door.