The email lands in my inbox at 7:42 a.m., right between an automated reminder about my course evaluations and a desperate plea from a student who has “definitely been in class all semester, promise.”
Subject: WESTBRIDGE FOUNDATION MEGA-GRANT – AWARD DECISION.
For a second I just stare at the bolded line, my cursor hovering uselessly over it. My office is quiet in that specific way halls are before nine: distant copier hum, a muffled laugh from somewhere down the corridor, the radiator clicking like it’s considering catching fire again.
I’ve visualized this moment a hundred times. In most of them, I was wearing something more impressive than a wrinkled black turtleneck and coffee-stained trousers.
I click.
“Dear Dr. Torres,
We are pleased to inform you that the Westbridge Foundation has selected your proposal—”
The words blur. Selected. Award. Ten million dollars over five years, and every zero is a tiny apology from the universe for every time someone called me “kiddo” in a faculty meeting.
My lungs forget how to process oxygen. I scroll, scanning for the catch.
“…in recognition of your innovative approach to integrating behavioral modeling with real-time systems design.”
Of course my eyes snag on the next line.
“As you know, the Foundation strongly encouraged collaborative leadership for a project of this scale. In consultation with Dean Harrington and the review committee, we are delighted to confirm the appointment of a co–Principal Investigator, Dr. Liam Shaw, whose complementary expertise—”
The rest might as well be a string of ampersands and middle fingers.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I whisper.
The radiator pops like it agrees.
Co–Principal Investigator.
Liam. Shaw.
The campus’s golden retriever in human form. The man whose guest lectures overflow the largest auditorium on campus. The one who never sits through a faculty meeting without making at least three jokes, two donors swoon, and one senior professor feel both flattered and gently bulldozed.
I push back from my desk hard enough that my chair rolls into the bookshelf. A photo frame rattles—my parents, standing in front of the Westbridge sign the day I got hired, my mother’s hand a quiet vise on my arm. I steady it before it can tip.
I should re-read the email. I should savor the words “selected” and “award” and “distinguished.” Instead, I click print and march across the hall.
The departmental office smells like burnt coffee and toner. Behind the counter, Samantha is sorting campus mail with a speed that ought to qualify as a sport. She gives me a quick grin. “Morning, Dr. Torres. You’re in early, even for you.”
“Is he here?” I ask.
She doesn’t bother to ask who. Of course she doesn’t. “Dean Harrington’s got an eight o’clock. He said not to let anyone—”
“Great, I’ll be non-anyone.” I push past the counter.
“Mila—”
The dean’s door is half ajar. I don’t knock. Carefully curated political caution can file a complaint later.
Harrington looks up from his laptop, mid-sip of coffee, and nearly chokes when he sees my face. “Good morning? To what do I owe—”
“You assigned me a co-lead.” I wave the printed email like it’s an indictment.
He blinks, quickly schooling his features into what he probably thinks is soothing neutrality. His tie is already loosened; he’s been here a while. “Congratulations are also in order, Mila. The Foundation—”
“You promised,” I cut in. The word comes out sharper than I intend, filled with months of white-knuckled grant writing and ignored social invitations and the way my hand shook when I hit submit. “You said if the proposal was strong enough, leadership would be mine.”
He sighs, folding his hands on his desk. “I said I would advocate for you. And I did. But the Foundation has its own priorities. They wanted, ah, balance.”
“Balance,” I repeat flatly. “You mean optics.”
“Mila.” His voice softens, the way men’s voices often do right before they tell you to be reasonable. “This is a flagship award. Donors like seeing familiar faces attached. Liam has a proven track record with outreach, media, stakeholder management—”
“And I have a proven track record of doing the actual work.” The words taste like acid. “If they wanted a mascot, they could’ve hired a golden retriever.”
He winces. “You and Liam have…different strengths. Together, you’ll be unstoppable.”
I laugh, a short, incredulous sound. “You genuinely think we won’t kill each other by week two?”
“Mila.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. There are new lines there; maybe the job’s finally carving through the affable veneer. “This is politics. They want your rigor and his star power. This doesn’t diminish you.”
It does. It will. Every acknowledgement, every citation, every whispered comment in the corridors: Of course they needed Liam. She couldn’t have done it alone.
I swallow that down. Pride is a luxury. Grants are not.
“Is he here?” I ask, ignoring the way my fingers have tightened on the paper.
“Not yet. We’re meeting at nine to go over space allocations and personnel. I was going to call you in after—”
“Don’t bother.” I step back. “I’ll be in the lab. My lab. Before your committee decides I should share my desk, too.”
“Mila—”
I’m already halfway out the door, pulse thrumming a syncopated beat against my throat.
The temporary space they gave me while the new wing is under renovation is technically a converted storage area. The fluorescent lights buzz, and the one window faces a brick wall, but there’s room for three workstations and a whiteboard the length of an entire wall. I’ve come to love its ugliness; it feels honest.
I’m sketching out a revised timeline when a knock sounds on the open door.
“Dr. Torres?”
Leah hovers there, clutching a laptop and a stack of notebooks like a shield. Her dark hair is in a messy bun; there’s a faint smear of ink on her cheekbone.
“Morning,” I say, grateful for the distraction. “You’re early.”
“You said we’d need to reconfigure the data pipeline if the grant came through, and I wanted to—” She stops, reading my expression. “Did it…?”
“It did.” The words should feel like champagne. Instead they feel like swallowing dry glass. “We got it.”
Her whole face lights up. “We—oh my God—Dr. Torres, that’s incredible. You did it.”
Her sincerity tugs at something in my chest. “We did it,” I correct automatically. “You’re the one who re-coded half the simulations at three in the morning.”
Color rises to her cheeks. “That was just…coffee and panic.”
I almost smile. Then, because honesty hurts worse than a headline, I add, “There’s a co-lead.”
Leah’s brows knit. “A…co-lead?”
“Liam Shaw.” I watch recognition dawn in her eyes, followed by the careful neutrality of someone trying to hide their reaction from their advisor.
“Oh,” she says finally.
“Exactly.” I cap the marker with perhaps more force than necessary. “We’ll adjust. The science doesn’t change. We keep our standards, we keep our boundaries, and we don’t let him turn this into a TED Talk.”
Leah presses her lips together, then says, “He…is very good at TED-Talking.”
I give her a look. She flushes again. “I just mean, he gets people excited. That could help, right? With recruitment, with—”
“With donors,” I finish for her. “Yes. That’s what they’re counting on.”
She hesitates. “You don’t think he’s…good?”
He’s brilliant. Infuriatingly so. It’s what makes this worse. If he were just a pretty face with a mediocre CV, I could write him off. But I’ve read his work. I’ve cited him. Once. Quietly.
“I think,” I say carefully, “that he has never had to walk into a room and prove he deserves to be there before anyone will listen. That can warp a person.”
Leah nods slowly, absorbing that. “What do you need me to do?”
The question steadies me more than any affirmation. Action. Structure. Things I can control.
“Draft a new project calendar,” I say. “Assume we’ll have two postdocs and four grad students. Build in triple redundancy for data backups. If we’re sharing leadership, we can’t afford sloppiness anywhere.”
She nods, already pulling up a scheduling app. “I’m on it.” She pauses at the door. “And…congratulations, really. Co-lead or not. This is huge.”
After she leaves, the room feels both too small and too loud with the echo of my thoughts.
I’m drawing an angry box around “Milestone 1: Pilot Trials” when footsteps slow outside. Male, confident, a rhythm that suggests the owner has never considered stopping for anyone.
He fills the doorway like he owns the building.
“Wow,” Liam says. “They really did give you the dungeon.”
He looks exactly the way the rumors paint him: tall, shoulders just broad enough to be distracting, light brown hair doing that artfully messy thing that probably takes either zero effort or too much; I can’t decide which is more annoying. His shirt is rolled at the sleeves to reveal tan forearms; his ID lanyard hangs crooked around his neck, the plastic badge flashing his grin every time he moves.
I refuse to stand. “Shaw.”
His mouth tilts. “Torres.” He leans against the doorframe, hands in his pockets, as if the last five years of our professional rivalry have been a series of flirty inside jokes instead of academic bloodsport.
“So,” he says. “We’re getting married.”
I stare. “Excuse me?”
“The grant,” he clarifies, almost laughing. “Five-year commitment, shared resources, probably joint custody of traumatized grad students. If that’s not an institutional marriage, what is?”
His ease grates across my nerves. “If this is your idea of a proposal, no wonder the Foundation thinks you need a chaperone.”
“Ah.” He pushes off the frame, stepping into the lab. The air feels smaller around him, the faint scent of his cologne—something clean, with citrus—threading into the chemical tang of whiteboard markers. “So you’ve heard the good news.”
“You’re half of it,” I say. “Let’s not get carried away.”
He winces theatrically, a hand over his heart. “Right. Lesson one: don’t expect a honeymoon phase.”
“Lesson one,” I counter, “this is my lab. If you want something, you ask.”
His gaze flicks around the room, taking in the mismatched chairs, the overworked servers cluster, the wall of equations. When his eyes land on the section labeled TORRES GRANT – SYSTEMS MODEL, something like genuine respect flashes there before he schools it. “It’s impressive,” he says quietly.
I shouldn’t care. “It’s underfunded,” I reply. “Or it was. Now it’s ours.” The word tastes wrong in my mouth.
“Ours,” he echoes, as if testing the shape of it. “Look, I know you’re not thrilled about this.”
“Perceptive,” I murmur.
“But it wasn’t my idea either,” he continues. “Harrington called me in last week, said the Foundation wanted a co-PI to, quote, ‘balance the optics and reassure stakeholders.’ I told him you didn’t need anyone to—”
“You told him?” I cut in. “You told him what, exactly?”
“That you’re the most rigorously terrifying person in this department and if anyone could run this solo, it’s you.” He shrugs when my eyebrows shoot up. “I like sleeping at night. Torching your grant didn’t seem like the path to peaceful dreams.”
For a moment, my thoughts stall.
“You advocated for me,” I say slowly.
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m capable of basic decency.” His mouth quirks. “Occasionally.”
Heat pricks at the back of my neck. I look away, annoyed at myself. “Basic decency would have been turning the position down.”
He goes still. When he speaks again, his voice has lost its easy lilt. “That would have been career suicide. For me, anyway. You might survive turning down ten million dollars. I wouldn’t.”
It’s the first hint I’ve ever heard of him acknowledging anything less than invincibility. The room feels different, recalibrated.
I study him. “Why? You’re the golden boy. They’d just toss you another grant to play with.”
Something flickers in his eyes—gone too fast for me to read. “You’d be surprised what sticks to you when people decide you’re a risk. I’ve already got one black mark on my record.”
I think of the rumor: the retracted paper from his postdoc, the hushed explanations about a collaborator’s error. He took the public hit. I always assumed it barely touched him.
He shifts, and the moment passes. “Anyway,” he says lightly, “here we are. Unwillingly betrothed. We should probably figure out who gets which side of the metaphorical closet.”
“We’re not sharing an office,” I snap.
He arches a brow. “The dean said we’d be consolidating space in the new wing. Joint lab, joint meeting room, joint coffee budget—which, by the way, I plan to abuse.”
I curse under my breath. Harrington mentioned space allocations; I’d been too busy seeing red to listen.
Liam grins, like he can feel the internal combustion. “Look, Torres. We can do this the painful way—constant turf wars, passive-aggressive calendar invites, dueling project visions—or we can do it the less painful way.”
“Which is?”
“Accept that we’re both obnoxiously good at what we do and figure out how not to waste five years proving it to each other instead of to the field.”
Our eyes lock. The line is irritatingly reasonable. I hate that.
“Define ‘not painful,’” I say.
He steps closer to the whiteboard, close enough that I can see the faint scar along his jaw I’ve never noticed in passing. He taps the top of my timeline with his knuckle. “We start here. You set the standards for methods, replication, all the terrifying rigor stuff. I handle external comms—donors, press, student recruitment. We both sign off on major decisions. We fight in here”—he gestures around us—“not in front of anyone who writes checks.”
“And authorship?” I ask. “Credit, talks, media quotes?”
His gaze snaps back to mine. “First senior author on the flagship paper is you. Non-negotiable.”
It’s more than I expected. “You’ll get pushback.”
“I’ll handle it.” His jaw tightens for a fraction of a second, that easy charm hardening beneath. “I’m good at smiling while saying no. You can stay scary.”
A laugh escapes me before I can strangle it. “You think I’m scary.”
“I think,” he says, quieter now, “you walk into rooms that were not built for you and refuse to shrink. That unsettles people. I like it.”
The sentence lands between us, heavier than the others. For a heartbeat, the fluorescent buzz fades, replaced by the rush of my own pulse in my ears.
This is dangerous territory.
“Flattery is a blunt instrument,” I manage. “Try not to bludgeon anyone important with it.”
His smile breaks, real and unexpected. It softens his whole face. “Noted.”
I look back at the board, needing distance. “Fine. We try it your…less painful way. But I’m not compromising on the science.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” His voice is closer than it should be.
I realize he’s stepped up beside me, our shoulders almost aligned as we face the board. The proximity sends a quick, disorienting jolt through me. I can feel the heat of him, the subtle shift of his breath as he reads.
“It’s ambitious,” he says, nodding at the overlapping phases. “And mildly terrifying. I like that, too.”
“Stop liking things,” I mutter.
“Not possible.”
I risk a sidelong glance. He’s studying the model, brow furrowed, tongue pressed just behind his teeth. The facade of effortless charm has slipped; this is the version of him who writes those annoyingly elegant methods sections.
It hits me, with an unwelcome clarity: if we weren’t on opposite sides of an invisible line, if I didn’t resent every inch of institutional wind at his back, I could like working with him.
“Torres?” he says softly.
“What.”
His eyes flick to mine, searching. “If we do this right, we can build something no one else can touch. You know that, yeah?”
The line sends a quiet shiver down my spine.
Power, not just survival. Not just proving I deserve my seat, but reshaping the goddamn table.
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m not letting you screw it up.”
He laughs, warm and startled. “Deal.” He extends his hand between us. “Truce?”
I look at it. At him.
This is a risk. Trust is a variable I don’t model with.
But the grant is real, and the clock is already ticking, and the only thing worse than sharing power with someone like Liam Shaw might be letting the people who want us divided win.
I slide my hand into his.
His fingers close around mine—firm, steady, warmer than I expect. A prickling line runs up my arm, a physiological response I absolutely refuse to dignify with analysis.
“Truce,” I say.
His thumb presses once, almost like a confirmation, before he lets go.
The absence of contact is ridiculous in its intensity.
He steps back, that easy grin snapping back into place. “Great. I’ll go charm the dean into giving us the good lab space in the new wing.”
“You mean I’ll send him a three-page justification memo,” I say. “You’ll wave at the donors.”
“Division of labor,” he agrees. Then, at the threshold, he glances back. “Oh, and Torres?”
I arch a brow.
“You might hate this now,” he says. “But give it time. Friction is just how you start a fire.”
The line hits something low and volatile in me.
Before I can decide whether to eviscerate him for the metaphor or file it away as inadvertent prophecy, he’s gone, footsteps fading down the hall.
I stand alone in the humming quiet of the lab, hand still faintly tingling, the word “ours” scrawled across the top of my future.
I pick up the marker and, beneath my carefully drawn timeline, add a new line in small, block letters.
RISK VARIABLES: LIAM SHAW.
Then, after a beat:
POTENTIAL PAYOFF: UNKNOWN.
The fluorescent lights flicker once overhead, like the room itself is holding its breath, waiting to see which way the fire will spread.
