“Oh, yeah. I get fed up with Sul and Hark all the time, but Eli’s my rock, as cheesy as it sounds. Did he tell you that it was his idea? The final breakthrough for the tech. We were stuck for ages, and then he figured out the last step. And he was so proud.” She smiled. “He was the kid, you know? The youngest. Hark was broody and worldly, but Eli was pure sunshine. Kind and fun and a total flirt. It has dulled over the years, because of everything that happened with his family, but you can still see that spark, right?”
I could. I did. And I wasn’t sure what someone with that kind of spark was doing with someone like me.
“I adored him from the start,” Minami continued. “But, Rue, it doesn’t really matter. I didn’t want you to know because of Eli. I wanted you to know because of you.” She stood. Looked down at me with a grave expression. “You and your friend should watch your backs with Florence. Neither of you deserves to go through what I did.”
When I pulled in to Kline’s parking lot, the sun baked high in the sky, and Florence was already outside, sitting on one of the benches on the side of the building. There was little doubt that she was waiting for someone.
“Hi, Rue,” she said, when I walked to her. Her hair was a fiery, bright orange in the midday light, a stark contrast to her melancholic smile. “Eli emailed me.”
I frowned. “He did?”
“He told me he gave you his version of what happened. Said I might want to give you mine.” She laughed softly, and there was some fondness for Eli in it, as though she liked him despite herself. “You know what he wrote to me?”
I shook my head.
“That when it all went down, ten years ago, what hurt him the most was not being able to understand the actions of someone he trusted. He’d never wish this on you, and thought I should give you an explanation.” She pressed her lips together. “He didn’t ask for an explanation for himself. Didn’t insult me. Wasn’t even passive aggressive. All three of them—Minami, Hark, Eli—have refused to talk to me ever since the loan was bought. Not a single communication happened without lawyers standing around. And here Eli Killgore is. Breaking the streak. For you.”
Florence’s words lingered in the air. My heart felt at once laden and wrung through a strainer. “And?” I asked. I could not bring myself to take a seat next to her.
“I’m not sure what he told you.”
It sounded enough like an admission that I had to brace myself. “Just give me your story, then.”
“Okay. I . . .” Florence ran a hand through her hair and sighed heavily. “You have to understand, Rue. The world is not black and white. There are shades of gray. There are difficult choices that people have to make sometimes. The UT job . . . the UT job was really bad. I realized that despite my grants and my output, they weren’t going to offer me tenure. It had happened before, to people more qualified than me. There were a couple of lawsuits and several investigations going on, all started by women in the department who’d been treated unfairly. Fucking terrible. And that’s when . . .” She shrugged. “Brock was a big part of it. Which should have been a red flag, but at the time our marriage wasn’t quite the dumpster fire it later became, and we were actively working on saving it. We were trying to have a baby, if you can believe it. We were brainstorming ways for me to get out of academia altogether, considering a move, maybe. Talked about it for months. In the end, pivoting to industry made the most sense. I was thinking of just getting a research staff job, but—Rue, will you sit?” She squinted, covering her eyes with her hand. “The sun is right behind you.”
I didn’t move. My feet were rooted to the ground. “But?”
“Well, it was Brock who brought it up. He said, ‘What about all the biofuel stuff you’ve been working on? Can’t you start your own company centered around that?’ And I . . .” She paused for a long, long while. “I began looking into how I could make it happen.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. “And you didn’t give the others any of the credit.”
“Come on.” She laughed. “Hark and Eli were never going to get credit. They were grad students, for fuck’s sake. No grad student gets credit for the kind of ideas they help refine. Their contributions were grunt work. Was I supposed to share the patent with two men, just because they’d run a couple of assays for me? Please. I knew they’d be fine.”
Eli hadn’t been, though. Nor Hark, I suspected. “What about Minami?”
“See, that’s . . .” Florence nodded slowly. “That really does hurt, in hindsight. I feel horrible for not including her in the patent. But I didn’t have any other choice. You know how hard it is, for women in our field. I was in a terrible situation, and—”
“Minami is a woman, too, and a more junior academic,” I interrupted harshly. I highly doubted Minami’s career had been as privileged as Florence’s. “And that’s not—Florence, having it hard doesn’t give us a pass to cheat other people out of their work, especially not to screw over people who have it harder.”
“I know. And I felt horrible—why do you think I spent the following years knee deep in mentorship programs, trying to uplift junior scientists? I was trying to atone for that.”
“The only correct way to atone is to give Minami credit.”
“Rue, if I hadn’t done what needed to be done, you know who would have owned the patent? Not me. Not Minami. Not Eli or Hark. UT would have owned it.”
“So what?” I blinked in confusion. “So it was okay to sacrifice everyone as long as you got it? It was Minami’s idea.”
“Only partially! I helped Minami refine it. I lent her my expertise. If it hadn’t been for me, it wouldn’t have moved past the most preliminary stages.”
“That’s not what Eli thinks.”
“Then he’s lying. Do you really believe him over me?”
You did lie to me, I wanted to say. Why did you lie to me? But the answer was obvious. And even if everything Florence was saying was true, even if her contribution was superior to everyone else’s, did that make what she’d done forgivable?
I studied her face, truly seeing it for the first time. Florence stared back, and then began laughing. “You know what this feels like?”
I remained silent.
“Like Eli and I are fighting over you.” She was still chuckling, but I could not see the humor. And my heart did hurt for Eli, but . . .
“The person on whose behalf I feel the most outrage, right now, is Minami.”
“Rue. I . . . I just hope you’ll be able to see my point of view. I hope that you realize that I had to make some very difficult choices, and forgive me.”
“It’s not my forgiveness you need,” I said.
She called after me, but I strode to my car without hesitation.
32
LET’S TRY TO MAKE IT RIGHT
RUE
And you’re really sure that she admitted to it?” Tisha asked for what had to be the fourth time. I’d already replied to the first three, but still didn’t blame her. I could scarcely believe it, and had gotten it straight from the source.