So obsessing over Six, which couldn't possibly be his real name, and who was quite literally the most handsome man she'd ever seen, was disconcerting. At the presentation, he'd slipped back out onto the stage moments before she'd started speaking and moved down the stairs to stand to the left of the podium. It was nice to see those broad shoulders as he turned his face out to the crowd. As she'd spoken to the audience, his head had turned from side to side as he'd observed the room, and focusing on the steady metronome of his movements had helped keep her calm. When she'd finished her speech, he'd offered her his hand to help her down the steps and then had mischievously whispered that there was a potted palm to her right if she felt the urge to barf. It had made her laugh and had loosened the tightness in her stomach.
As she'd been forced to listen to her mother gush about her latest boyfriend, she'd watched Six from beneath the safety of her bangs. Given his handsome face and incredibly confident posture, she knew she wasn't the only woman watching. Toward the end of the evening, she'd seen a beautiful woman in a green dress approach him and hand him a slip of paper on which Louisa imagined she'd written her phone number. Six had glanced at it and then looked straight back at the woman and grinned, nodding his head as if in agreement. Later, though, she'd also seen him slip his wallet out of his pocket, take out some bills, and hand them over to Valerie, one of the foundation members who had been collecting money from the attendees. Most people flashed their credit cards, or brought checks, so the sweet gesture had warmed Louisa's heart. Her mother's latest boy toy, Lucan, who had accompanied her to the event, hadn't opened his wallet once, and Louisa had struggled to contain her frustration when he'd asked her mother to bid on their behalf in the silent auction for a luxury trip to the Galápagos Islands.
Louisa gathered her bags and stepped out of her Audi A3, a car her mother had called "pedestrian." As if she had the right to judge-or had any judgment herself-these days. She'd been on a self-destructive kick since Louisa's father's death, dating men way younger than herself who were, unfortunately, out for one thing only-the gifts the North family millions could provide. Gigolos, charlatans, call them what Louisa would, her mother just wouldn't listen and was routinely getting her heart broken after a lavish trip or expensive item had been paid for. How she could be so clueless about these men was unfathomable.
Using her pass, Louisa let herself into the building and discreetly hurried down the corridor to her locker. No one really understood her acute terror at being around people. Even experts who professed to be able to cure her failed to understand how debilitating it could be. She planned her journeys around the paths of least resistance, which meant she arrived at places either before they opened or just before they shut for the day. The hallways were empty as she slipped her purse into her locker and closed it.
She and Ivan had been working through a complex revised formula the previous day, but she still felt as though they were missing something. Today, Ivan was attending the company board meeting with his grandfather, Vasilii, a job Louisa didn't envy. Accounts, balance sheets, committee meetings, and action items all made Louisa shudder. Give her an opportunity to develop models of pathological dynamic activities in neurological disease, and she was all over it, but corporate objectives killed her brain cells faster than cerebral hypoxia.
She put on her lab coat and gloves, passed through the air blower, and stepped into the cool embrace of her lab. Her sanctuary. It felt more like home than home. There were some cultures growing that she needed to check on, and she was excited to have been asked to review the results of a brain slice out of the Baltimore Huntington's Disease Center over at Johns Hopkins. Who got results first or made the biggest strides in the race for the cure really didn't matter to Louisa, just so long as somebody did, and soon.
A cold blast of air washed over her as she opened the refrigerator to grab the cultures. She grabbed them off the shelf and was about to close the door when she noticed that one of the samples she'd put in there the night of the presentation was missing. Sliding the cultures in her hand back onto their shelf, she stood on her toes to see if the samples had been pushed back into the deep unit. But it was empty. She thought through her steps five days earlier when she had deliberately switched the dangerous sample with an innocuous one because of her paranoia that her papers had been messed with.
She gazed across all of the shelves and all of the samples. It was obviously possible that Ivan had been in the lab while she hadn't been there, but he'd always been an incredibly thoughtful and thorough lab partner and had graciously humored her need for order. Until he got out of his meeting, she couldn't ask him in person where the sample might be, but she could step outside, grab her phone, and send him a quick text in the hope that he would check in some time before the end of the day, however unlikely that was. Vasilii, who was old school, had limited patience with digital interference during meetings.