The job was supposed to be quiet. Calendars. Grant deadlines. Coffee. Leila Karam is three weeks into assisting the department's most famous researcher when she discovers his landmark study doesn't match its own data.
Dr. Adrian Choi has spent eleven years building his name on that paper. He's twenty years older, twice divorced, and the only person in the building with the authority to bury what she found.
He doesn't. He stands up in a room full of people who owe him and pulls the whole study down.
What's left, when the newspapers are done and the salaries are cut, is a woman with a stack of raw data, a man with a reputation to rebuild, and a question neither is allowed to ask inside the department walls: how much of this-really-is about the science?
