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Adam has an impressive poker face even when drunk, but Olive has gotten pretty good at telling when he’s had too much. The giveaway is his subtle but progressive blurring of the line between proven scientific facts and his own pet theories.
The third time he confidently informs Jeremy that the application of weighted multi-kernel learning to cancer diagnostics has made previous models obsolete, Olive pours a tall glass of water and discreetly swaps it out with the whiskey at his elbow.
‘Ol, this place is gorgeous,’ says Anh for what must be the hundredth time. Olive isn’t sick of hearing it yet. Real estate around Palo Alto has skyrocketed recently, and this modest weatherboard house is nowhere near what she and Adam could have afforded if they’d bought even a year ago – but a year ago, Olive didn’t yet have her tenure-track offer at Stanford, and Adam saw no point putting down roots near his workplace if it wasn’t going to work for her. The property they’ve purchased is smaller than the place they were renting, but it checks all the boxes: it’s close to campus and is clean and light and airy, with offices for both of them and a guest room for all the friends who are scattered across the country in distant pockets of academe and industry. Her favorite thing is the beautiful red brick patio out the back. They’re all gathered there together now, Olive’s whole grad school family – Adam and Anh and Jeremy and Malcolm and Holden – clustered around the outdoor dining table under a twinkling canopy of newly strung lights, celebrating this latest page of Olive’s happily ever after.
She finally has a home of her own. A home she never has to leave, a home that belongs to just her and Adam – and okay, also kind of to the bank they got their mortgage from. But Adam’s salary still makes Olive’s eyes water every time she checks their joint bank statements, and the pay for her own new assistant professorship is surprisingly less far behind him than she thought it would be, so she’s not too stressed about their ability to pay it off.
‘I know, right?’ Olive takes a sip of Adam’s confiscated drink and grimaces at the taste. She’s maybe a little bit tipsy herself, but there’s no degree of inebriation that could fool her into thinking whiskey tastes good. ‘We’re still going back and forth on our renovation plans – for some reason, Adam doesn’t like the fuchsia tiles in the bathroom.’
‘That’s because they don’t match the rest of the house,’ Holden chimes in, leaning forward over the table. ‘You know what a stickler he is for visual harmony. The obvious solution is to add more fuchsia.’
Adam is still too busy berating Jeremy about his favorite machine learning algorithms to give Holden the finger, which is further proof he’s three sheets to the wind. Poor Jeremy’s eyes are starting to glaze over. Jeremy went straight out of grad school into a cushy pharmaceutical job, and has spent the past few years blissfully free of the obligation to keep up with advancements not directly related to his product. Olive harbors a suspicion that Adam targets Jeremy with this kind of talk on purpose to punish him for defecting to industry – because Adam may have mellowed, but science still turns him into kind of an ass sometimes.
Olive’s not too stressed about that either. If he takes it too far, Anh will step in, and even drunk Adam in maximum ass mode knows better than to mess with Anh.
‘Hey,’ she says after one last sip of whiskey almost makes her gag, ‘I think we’ve got some cranberry juice in the fridge. It’s not quite fuchsia, but it’s very pink. We should make cocktails. Anh, Malcolm, you guys in? Holden?’
‘We have an early flight tomorrow,’ says Anh apologetically. Unfortunately, there was no amount of money that could have bought Olive a house on the West Coast with a direct magic portal to the East. Living across the country from her best friend sucks, but Anh is thriving at MIT, and between Jeremy’s work travel, a steady annual conference calendar and their own mutual effort, they still see each other bearably often. The fact that Anh made time to fly all this way just to come to Olive’s housewarming makes Olive’s heart feel full enough to burst.
‘We don’t.’ Malcolm grins, already rising to his feet. ‘You’ll never hear me turn down a cocktail – the pinker, the better. You have Cointreau and lime? We could make cosmopolitans.’
‘Make one for me too, babe,’ Holden calls after him.
Inside, Olive takes a moment to savor the slightly scuffed beauty of her very own kitchen. Malcolm puts his arm around her and says, in a gentle, serious voice, ‘I’m so happy for you, Ol. You guys are going to be happy here.’
Olive leans into him. And then keeps on leaning as he busies himself making cocktails. Okay, yeah, so she’s definitely tipsy too. It’s impossible to tell where the warm burn of inebriation stops and the deep, genuine joy for the new life she’s building sets in, but the two delights are fueling each other so that Olive’s insides glow with the warmth of a well tended fireplace.
There’s no fireplace in her new home. But that’s fine. In California, she’s not going to need one; sleeping next to Adam every night, Adam with his furnace body heat and his tendency to cling, she’s usually more interested in A/C.
Fragments of the ongoing argument outside float through the kitchen window. ‘A real job?’ Jeremy is saying. ‘You sound like someone’s curmudgeonly uncle. I’m a research scientist, Carlsen, not a Tik Tok influencer.’
‘A tick – what?’
Olive straightens and starts squeezing lime juice faster. If they’ve reached the point in the conversation where someone’s about to introduce Adam to Tik Tok then Olive needs to be out there to witness it. He’s going to be an ass about it. At the end of the day he is still, and probably always will be, kind of an ass. But he’s her ass. These are her people. This is her home. This is a housewarming party, but in a strange way it feels like a farewell. To her old life. To all those years of loneliness and uncertainty. To the version of herself who had no one, who had nowhere, and who never dared hope that either of those things would change.
‘Yeah,’ she tells Malcolm belatedly as she arranges a wedge of garnish on his cocktail glass. ‘Yeah, I think we really are.’