The Human Variable

The email arrived at 7:12 a.m., a bland subject line from Dr. Greta Nadir—Update on Committee Review—sitting like a trap in Elara’s inbox. She stared at it, the edges of her vision fuzzing from the hours she’d already spent combing through spectroscopic data. The last simulation of methane absorption bands still flickered on her second monitor. She’d been up since four.

She clicked.

Greta’s message was short, too careful. “They’re impressed with the novelty and rigor. However, a few members raised concerns about ‘long-term viability’ given your singular professional focus. They worry about support structures outside of work. I’m sorry. Can we talk this morning?”

Elara exhaled in a sharp, humorless burst. Support structures. She glared at the words until they ghosted on the screen. Her fingers curled and uncurled on the desk. Through the glass wall of her office, the wide hallway of the observatory was empty, early light leaking in through skylights, pooling on tile.

Her phone buzzed. Greta.

“Elara?” Greta’s voice cautious, too light. “I didn’t want you to read that cold. Can I come down?”

“No,” Elara said. “We’re talking now.”

A pause. “All right. They were thrilled by the radiative transfer model, the way you’re integrating cloud microphysics with photochemistry—”

“And?” Elara’s jaw clenched. She watched the methane spectrum redo itself as if repetition would pin reality into compliance.

“And some of them… it’s ridiculous, but they’re conservative. They want to know you’ll be stable through the life of the grant. They use words like ‘resilience,’ ‘balance.’ They asked if you had a support system.”

“My support system is an instrument cluster that’s the envy of three continents,” Elara said, each syllable deliberate. “My stability is twenty-three peer-reviewed papers and a dataset no one else has. My ‘balance’ is that I don’t drink on weeknights and I run four miles at dawn.” Heat rose into her face. “What did you say to them?”

“I told them what I always tell them. You are disciplined, brilliant, and your work is inarguably important. I mentioned your mentorship of the undergrads, that you have friends on the team.”

“They want pictures of me at a picnic,” Elara said. The words tasted like metal. “They want to see me blowing out candles so they feel safe wiring funds.”

“Elara,” Greta said, gentler, “you know this isn’t about birthdays. It’s about optics.”

“It is about birthdays,” Elara shot back. “It is about whether or not I’m palatable.”

Silence hummed between them. From somewhere down the hall, a cart rattled; a tech laughed, the sound bright, oblivious. Elara closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. The back of her neck ached. She thought about the nights she’d slept on her office couch, the lumpy pillow she kept in the bottom drawer, the way dawn light hit the dome like a benediction when she’d been up all night and the code finally ran.

“They want me to be someone,” she said, softer. “In addition to being the person who’s going to read the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets, they want me to be… soft, I guess. Decorated with other people.”

“They’re scared,” Greta said. “They shouldn’t be, but they are. They’ve seen projects derail when PIs burn out.”

“I don’t burn out. I calcify and sharpen.” She let out a breath that trembled. “My models are good. The pipelines are good. The instrument time is secured. They should be salivating.”

“They are,” Greta said. “We can counter. We’ll prepare them for the Q&A. We’ll talk about ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’ and how you’ve structured your team.”

Elara’s gaze drifted to the whiteboard opposite her desk. Equations snaked over it, arrows and brackets, notes in different colors that only she could fully translate. A smear of blue suggested a hand dragged there in haste. Her life was there, in a scrawl of notation and small, private triumphs. Now it felt suddenly inadequate, fragile in the face of a roomful of suits who didn’t know methane from ethane but knew they wanted to see her smile with a partner at a gala.

“I don’t have time to perform,” she said. “I have time to write. I have time to analyze. I have time to fix bugs and coax a temperamental spectrograph into doing what I need. I don’t have time to manage their fear.”

“I’ll handle what I can,” Greta said. “But it might help to—Elara, hear me—show them some of what you keep hidden. The human part. You don’t have to date someone. You don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not.” A beat. “Just let them see you’re not alone in the world.”

Elara laughed once, thin and hard. “I am alone in the world when I am doing the thing I’m best at. That’s the point. The thing requires it.” She pushed herself up from her chair and began to pace, bare feet silent on the carpet. She’d kicked her shoes off hours ago. Papers rustled as the air shifted. The office smelled faintly like coffee and dry-erase ink. “I don’t care if they think I’m charming. I care if they understand that I can separate the sodium lines from the stellar noise.”

Another pause. “I know,” Greta said finally, voice warm with the old respect that had pulled Elara through the worst parts of grad school. “And you’re right. This isn’t fair. I’m angry, too.”

The admission broke something rigid inside Elara. She slumped back into her chair and stared at the screen again. The words in the email hadn’t changed. Singularity of focus. Lack of a personal life. She thought about the word singular, its elegance when it belonged to stars and black holes, its accusation when it belonged to her.

“Tell them,” she said, “that if they want to fund stability, they can put their money into a high-yield savings account. If they want to fund discovery, they can accept that discovery has a shape. And I am that shape.”

“Elara,” Greta murmured, a smile in it despite everything. “I’ll tell them you said that, in gentler terms.”

“Don’t,” Elara said, but a corner of her mouth twitched. The anger didn’t abate. It settled into her bones, a dense weight. “When do they want the presentation?”

“Two weeks. There will be donors at the university gala this weekend. It would be good to be seen.”

An image flickered in Elara’s mind: polished wood, low lighting, the press of bodies and the dull ache of shoes that pinched. She swallowed. “I’ll go,” she said. The words tasted like concession and strategy all at once.

“Good. I’ll swing by at eleven. We’ll map out the pitch and the optics,” Greta said softly. “Get some air until then.”

After they hung up, the silence in the office felt different. The walls seemed closer. Elara rolled her chair back and stood, pressing her palms into the small of her back until it cracked. In the reflection of the glass, she saw herself: hair twisted into a practical knot, dark circles underneath eyes that were too sharp for the early hour, a sweater stretched thin at the elbows.

“I’m not an optics problem,” she said to the empty room. It didn’t matter that there was no one to hear it. Saying it out loud steadied her.

Her computer chimed—another dataset finished rendering. The jagged line of a spectrum rose on the screen, familiar and clean. She drew closer, fingers already on the keyboard, body wanting to sink back into the only conversation that never asked her to be anything but exact.

But even as she worked, the irritation roiled, a current underneath concentration. If they wanted performance, she would perform—on her terms. She opened a blank document and began outlining the pitch, the science so clear it would cut through any doubt, the slides planned with an economy and force that would make breath catch.

And against her will, she added, at the bottom: Gala talking points. Phrases for the donors. Smile cues. The smallest concessions to the game they demanded she play. She typed each bullet like an argument, like a dare.

Outside, the sky brightened. Somewhere above the building, trapped in a lightening dome of air pollution and marine layer, the stars retreated. Elara kept her gaze on the little distant worlds she could measure, refusing to let a committee’s hunger for domestication reduce the vastness of what she could do.

Julian Croft had been told to make it “warm.” His editor’s email was a cheerful shove: humanize a scientist, get something that would make the subscribers feel inspired about curiosity again. He’d rolled his eyes, typed “On it,” and then spent an hour staring at the ceiling above his desk, counting the hairline cracks until they blurred. The list of candidates was long and bland. Dr. Elara Vance’s name stood out with an asterisk and a string of glowing descriptors he hadn’t written: visionary, brilliant, reclusive. Too good to be true, which meant there was likely a person under the accolades who could make his piece sing. Or at least give him ten usable inches of copy so he could get back to the other pitches his editor would never greenlight.

He drove to the observatory with a notebook in his jacket and a camera he didn’t plan to use, telling himself he’d be in and out. The building rose white and sleep-heavy against the brightening morning, a place that had the gall to look serene while people inside it solved problems that would have made his high school physics teacher weep. He signed in at the front desk with a smile he’d perfected back when people asked him to tell them about the story he’d broken that year—the last year anyone had looked at him like he was going somewhere.

He followed the corridor lined with posters of constellations and graphs that blurred into textures. He liked the quiet in halls like this: the tap of keys, the low hum of machines, the sense that thinking was happening behind doors. Vance’s name was on frosted glass at the end. The door was ajar, light cutting a sharp trapezoid across the carpet.

He meant to knock. He meant to announce himself, handshake, introduce the premise as something earnest and non-threatening. But he heard the tone first—Elara’s voice, edged and controlled, talking to someone on speaker. He stopped with his knuckles hovering, a guilty reflex keeping him still.

“My support system is an instrument cluster that’s the envy of three continents,” she was saying, as if she’d repeated it in her head a dozen times and decided to say it out loud just once to watch it exist. “My stability is twenty-three peer-reviewed papers and a dataset no one else has.”

Julian’s hand fell back to his side. He didn’t step away. He watched the slice of her visible through the crack—dark hair twisted up, profile severe and beautiful in the clean light of her monitors, bare feet curled under her chair. The room smelled faintly of coffee and whiteboard cleaner even from here. He stayed because the words hooked under his ribs. He stayed because the pieces he’d been writing lately didn’t have heat like that in them, and hunger moved inside him—the old kind, not for clicks but for a story that felt taut and worth following.

She laughed once, a sound with no humor. “They want pictures of me at a picnic. They want to see me blowing out candles so they feel safe wiring funds.”

He imagined the person on the other end offering platitudes. He imagined Elara as the kind of person who had learned to be sharp because softness had cost her time she couldn’t spare. His notebook felt useless, stupidly blank in his back pocket. He read the small notes taped to her door—lab safety reminders, a sketch of a comet. He wondered when she’d last slept.

“I am alone in the world when I am doing the thing I’m best at,” she said, quieter. “That’s the point. The thing requires it.”

The admission was so naked he had the decency, finally, to step back. He let the heel of his shoe scuff the tile on purpose. Inside, a chair moved. Voices ceased. Julian knocked then, two light raps.

“Come in,” she called, careful and even.

He opened the door and saw the whole of her. She was smaller than he expected and somehow larger at the same time, presence making the office feel like it was mapped around her. She took him in quickly—the worn jacket, the press badge clipped to his pocket, the smile he softened into something apologetic.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Julian Croft. I emailed yesterday. ‘Human Side of Science’ series?”

If there was a flicker of recognition, it didn’t reach her mouth. She straightened in her chair but didn’t close the documents on her screen. “You’re early.”

“I am,” he said. “Hoping to steal twelve minutes before your day devours you.”

“Has it already devoured yours?” Her eyebrows lifted.

There it was—the delicate disdain he’d expected, laced with curiosity. He found himself wanting to answer. “Depends on the definition. I’ve been chewing on it.” He stopped. This was not the time to be charming. “I heard the tail end of a conversation. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

Her gaze sharpened. “But you did.”

He lifted a shoulder. “I didn’t stop as quickly as I should have. And I’m sorry. It sounded… important.”

“It was tedious,” she said. “Important things are usually quiet.”

He smiled. “Noted.” He moved inside and kept a respectful distance from the desk. The whiteboard behind her made him want to line up his edges. “I’m not here to ask you to pose with a lab coat slung over your shoulder, Dr. Vance. I’m here to ask you to tell me why anyone should care about what you care about, and I’m here to promise I won’t ask about your favorite color.”

“Those pieces usually include favorite colors,” she said. “And pets.”

“Do you have a pet?” He regretted it the second it left his mouth—a reflexive joke, something to disarm, wrong tool for the moment.

“No,” she said. “Do you have a point, Mr. Croft?”

He took a breath. “My editor wants something warm. I’d like to write something true. You’re talking about atmospheres on worlds no one will ever touch. That’s already human to me. If the people holding money want to see you at a picnic, I can’t fix their taste. But I can at least put your words in front of people who might learn to listen better.” He paused. “Twelve minutes. If after that you tell me to leave, I’ll go.”

She studied him like a puzzle, weighing whatever she saw in his face against the clock in her head. He watched the fight in her—time versus optics, contempt versus the possible use of this man who had walked in at the exact worst moment. He didn’t look away. He let her see the fatigue in him, the part of him that hated the word warm as a mandate, the part that had perked up at the sound of her drawing a boundary in the shape of a sentence.

“Ten,” she said finally. “And no personal questions.”

He nodded. “Deal.”

“Sit,” she said, gesturing to the chair opposite. “If you ask me about balance, I will end the interview.”

“I’ll ask you about methane,” he said. “And the shape of discovery.” He watched the tiniest tilt in her mouth.

“Fine,” she said. “Ask.” The call he’d interrupted was gone. The line she’d drawn still hummed in the air. He clicked his pen open like a prayer and leaned forward, feeling his day alter under his feet.

He asked about methane and escape velocities and the problem of teasing a biosignature out of noise, and the tightness in her shoulders eased by degrees. She answered in crisp sentences, fingers moving when she needed to sketch a curve in the air. He listened, really listened, and for a moment he almost lost the thread of why he’d come.

Ten minutes hit like a quiet alarm. She glanced at the corner of her screen. “Time’s up.”

He could have thanked her and left with a few clean quotes. He could have sent his editor something polite and thin. Instead, the hunger that had put him in the car that morning pressed against his ribs. He looked at her, at the straight line of her mouth, the light cutting the plane of her cheek, and the sentence came out of him before he could talk himself into safe.

“I have a proposal,” he said. “One that will make you want to throw me out and one that, if you don’t, could solve both our problems.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t have problems. I have variables.”

“Your committee wants you to look like a person with a life. My editor wants a human story. You don’t want to hemorrhage time pretending to audition for a lifestyle magazine, and I don’t want to write a puff piece. We could make an arrangement.”

She didn’t move. “I don’t like that word.”

“You’re going to hate the next ones,” he warned, palms up. “But I need to say them exactly, or it won’t be honest. I will be your stable, supportive boyfriend for public-facing events until your grant is decided. Galas. Donor dinners. Panels. Photos that don’t make you feel like you’re being paraded. I handle the optics, the hand on your back when you want to leave a conversation, the smile at the right moments. In exchange, I get access. To your work. Your process. Your life as it relates to your work. Enough to write something long and true.”

Silence hit the room like a drop in pressure. Her face didn’t change. She blinked once. “No.”

“I know how it sounds,” he said quickly. “Transactional and ugly. But you and I both stood in this room minutes ago thinking about the same thing. They want optics. They’re going to scrutinize you for not looking like their idea of normal. You can either let that force you into a dozen small humiliations and wasted hours, or you can contain it. Outsource it to someone whose only job is to absorb the nonsense.”

Her chin lifted. “You.”

“Me,” he said. “I’ve been doing optics for two years. I can talk to donors without wanting to set myself on fire. I can field rude questions with a smile. I can take bad photos that look candid. Let me be the boyfriend-shaped shield. You set the rules. You set the boundaries. I sign whatever you want.”

Her fingers tapped the desk once, a small controlled release. “You overheard five minutes of my frustration and think you can turn it into a byline.”

He didn’t flinch. “I think we can turn it into cover. And a story that’s not soft. I’ll write about how you think, how you work, what you’re trying to do to the way we look at worlds. I don’t care about favorite colors. I don’t care if you’ve ever had a dog.”

“You would lie,” she said flatly, “in public, for months.”

“Yes,” he said. “About this part. To people who have already decided your value is tied to whether you have someone to split a rent with. The other part—the work, the science—I won’t touch with anything but reverence.”

“And when your article comes out?” she asked. “You publish a confession that we manipulated a committee?”

“I wouldn’t publish anything that jeopardizes your work,” he said. “We decide what is on the record. We decide timing. If it hurts your chances, it doesn’t see daylight. If you get the grant, we can tell the truth later or we can bury it and I write something else. I’m not trying to blow up your life. I’m trying to make the worst piece of this tolerable and useful.”

She stood, pacing once to the whiteboard and back, energy contained but visible. “Ethically, it’s indefensible.”

“Ethically, the committee judging your cosmic chemistry by your kitchen chemistry is indefensible,” he said. “We’re not falsifying data. We’re making assholes comfortable.” He softened. “You don’t owe them your personal life. If they demand a version of it to check a box, hire an actor.”

“I don’t hire,” she said. “And you’re not an actor.”

He let himself smile, small. “I’m a quick study.”

She stared at him like she could measure the arc between his words and whatever lived underneath them. “What would this access look like.”

“No surprises,” he said. “I don’t show up unannounced. I don’t record you without consent. I sit in on things you approve. I learn enough to write and to improvise backstory at events. I look convincing next to you. I take the heat so you can do your job.”

“And I suppose there would be… touch.” The word was clinical in her mouth, a category.

“In public,” he said. “Whatever you decide is believable and tolerable. A hand on your arm. A photo where you look like you like me. No more.”

She watched him as if waiting for the catch to creep out of him like a tell. “Why you.”

“Because I’m already here,” he said. “Because I’m not on your campus or in your field, so I’m not dangerous politically. Because I need a way back to writing that matters and this is the only angle my editor will greenlight that might let me do it. I’m being crass because it’s the truth. I get a story. You get cover.”

“And you think I’ll agree to use a man as a prop to placate a committee that thinks my worth rises with my relationship status.”

“I think you’ll do whatever gets your work funded with the least damage,” he said quietly. “I think you’ll choose the option that quarantines the nonsense and lets you keep your hours. I think you’ll write rules that make me wish I’d never opened my mouth.”

Her mouth twitched, not a smile. Something considering. “There would be rules.”

“God, I hope so,” he said. “I’m better with instructions.”

She turned her back to him and faced the screens again, the data unbothered by this intrusion. He waited, still as he could make himself. She was not a person who filled silences with anything other than thought.

“Get out,” she said at last, not looking. “I need to work.”

He nodded, throat tight with a mix of humiliation and relief that he had said it out loud. He stood and moved to the door. His hand was on the knob when she said, “Email me the terms as you imagine them. No adjectives. Bullet points. I will read them after I finish what I’m doing.”

He turned, met her profile. “Okay.”

“And if you contact anyone else about this, including your editor, before I decide, it’s over. You’ll never see me again.”

“I won’t,” he said.

She finally glanced over, eyes cool. “I haven’t agreed. I likely won’t.”

“I know,” he said, feeling something open in his chest anyway. “Thank you for not laughing.”

“I don’t laugh at bad ideas,” she said. “Only careless ones.” She looked back to the screen. “Close the door on your way out.”

He did. In the corridor, he leaned against the cool wall and exhaled, then took out his notebook. He wrote: boyfriend-shaped shield. No surprises. Bullet points. Then he walked to the parking lot, the stupid sun too bright, already composing the dry terms of a ridiculous pact he wasn’t sure he wanted and wanted more than anything he’d wanted in a very long time.

She didn’t open his email for hours. It sat like a contaminant in her inbox while she ran models and adjusted priors and pretended not to hear her mentor’s voice repeating the phrase “personal stability” as if it belonged in the same sentence as spectrographic calibration.

When the simulation finished a run, she clicked it. No adjectives, bullet points. He had listened. It made her angrier.

• Duration: until grant decision (est. 4–6 months).
• Scope: public-facing events only (galas, panels, donor dinners, interviews).
• Physical contact: minimal, pre-agreed (handhold, arm around back).
• Access: scheduled observation of work processes; no proprietary data shared without permission.
• Privacy: no unannounced visits; no recording without explicit consent.
• Editorial: you review any material that mentions you prior to publication; veto on anything that could harm your application.
• Backstory: mutually constructed, rehearsed.
• Exit clause: either party can terminate with 24 hours’ notice.

It was tidy, and she hated the tidiness, the way he had translated her rage into lines that could be signed. She hovered over reply, then closed the window and stood up too fast, the room tilting for a moment. She grabbed her jacket. She needed air, and she needed to tell him what she should have said the instant the proposal left his mouth.

She found him on the observatory steps, hunched over his phone, hair pushed back like he’d dragged his hand through it too many times. When he saw her, he straightened, hope flickering in his face like a stupid porch light.

“No,” she said, before he could speak. The word was clean. It felt good in her mouth.

He swallowed. “You read—”

“I read your contract for pretending to be a person so a board can feel comfortable funding science.” She stopped two steps below him, forcing him to look down at her. “I am not a species to be handled. I’m not hiring you to be a warm prop.”

His mouth closed, opened. “I—”

“It is dishonest,” she continued, each sentence precise, like dictation. “It’s manipulative. It’s an ethical nightmare from every angle. It opens both of us to scrutiny and destroys the barrier between my work and public performance. It asks me to waste time I do not have choreographing a lie to appease the worst instincts of people with power.”

He held her gaze. “They already made it clear they’re watching this. I thought—”

“You thought you could turn my anger into a byline,” she said, cutting cleanly. “You walked in, overheard five minutes of my private conversation, and you translated that into an opportunity. Do you hear how predatory that is? Opportunistic? You’re asking me to put my reputation in your hands, hands that answer to an editor who wants a cute angle.”

His jaw tightened. “I’m not your enemy.”

“You’re a stranger with a deadline,” she said. “And a proposal that turns my life into copy. You think you’re offering cover; you’re offering a trap. I would be accountable to your story every time we stood in the same frame. I would have to think about whether a laugh looks rehearsed, whether a glance reads as real, whether Dr. Albright’s assistant will note how far apart our shoulders are in a photo. Do you understand how much cognitive bandwidth that is? How many hours of my workday you are trying to reroute into managing your performance?”

“Into managing optics that they demand,” he said, quietly. “I’m offering to handle it so you don’t have to.”

“You handling it is the problem,” she said. “You commodify people for a living. You put them in paragraphs and sell them. You sell me. You dress it up as admiration and long-form integrity and access. You want to write something ‘true’? The truth is that your plan is absurd. It’s juvenile. It treats my project like a brand campaign.” She felt heat lick up her neck, furious clarity sharp as cold air. “You walked in with pretty cheekbones and a way with questions and decided you could insert yourself into my orbit. You are not the center of my story.”

He flinched at that, a flick she might have missed if she weren’t trained to see tiny shifts. He started to speak. She lifted her hand. “No. Listen to me, Mr. Croft. If I show up to a gala with a boyfriend, if I take photos with his arm around me, it will be because that person is my partner. Not because you created a version of one that polls well. I am not going to lie for a grant, and I am not going to let you lie on my behalf to resuscitate your career.”

He looked past her for a second, like he was choosing between responses. When he met her eyes again, the charm was gone. “I wasn’t trying to resuscitate anything at your expense,” he said. “I thought we could use each other. Cleanly.”

“There is nothing clean about it,” she said. “Not when the premise is a fiction designed to manipulate a decision. Not when I would have to build a backstory and rehearse it and repeat it until it calcified into something I’d have to live with. Not when you would be taking notes on my life and deciding what parts are publishable. You write like that’s noble. It is not. It is extraction.”

Silence spread between them, edged with fatigue. The late sun turned the metal railing into a white line. He put his hands in his pockets, a posture like he wanted to look smaller. “I heard you,” he said finally, voice low. “And I deserved most of that. You’re right about the committee. You’re right that this is ugly. I thought ugly and useful might be better than ugly and alone.”

“I am not alone,” she said. “I have colleagues and a lab and a mind that has arranged thousands of hours into something that could change how we look at the universe. I do not need to add your shadow to it.”

He nodded. The hope had gone out of him, replaced by something flatter. “Okay,” he said. “No.”

“No,” she repeated. “And don’t paint your suggestion as chivalry. It’s not noble to offer yourself as a decoy if you’re also writing the script. That is not a shield. That is a mirror with your face in it.”

He huffed a tiny, humorless sound. “You’re good with words when you’re angry.”

“I’m good with words when people try to turn my life into narrative arcs,” she said. “I don’t want your article. I don’t want your help. If my mentor contacts you for a quote, decline. If your editor pushes you to write about me anyway, don’t. If you publish anything with my name in it without my consent, I will make certain every institution I have access to understands exactly what you did here.”

He didn’t look surprised. “I won’t,” he said. “I won’t write about you if you don’t want me to.”

“Good,” she said. Her hands had stopped shaking. The decision sat in her chest like a weight settling exactly where it belonged. “Go home, Mr. Croft. Write about something else. Leave me out of it.”

He stepped aside so she could pass. The part of her that catalogued detail noted that he didn’t try to touch her, didn’t reach for some last bit of charm. He just nodded once, a small, tired motion.

“Dr. Vance,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I made you feel cornered.”

She paused at the bottom step, not looking back. “I didn’t feel cornered,” she said. “I felt insulted.”

Then she walked across the lot, each step deliberate, the key fob cold in her palm. Inside the car, she let her forehead rest against the steering wheel for a count of three and exhaled. No. It was a clean answer. It would hold.

Back in her office, she deleted his email, emptied the trash, and reopened her models. The data didn’t care about appearances. The universe didn’t care about her hand on anyone’s back. The only thing she could control was the work. She pulled the window back into focus and sank into it, shutting the door in her head with the same finality she’d used on him.

She worked until the numbers blurred. The grant portal sat open on the second monitor, the checklist a neat ladder of tasks she’d already completed, and one box that wasn’t a task at all: “Professional Stability Statement (optional).” It might as well have flashed. Her mentor’s voice threaded through every equation, every atmospheric model. “They’re conservative. They need a picture they can understand.”

Midnight came and went. Coffee cooled untouched, leaving a bitter line on her tongue. She toggled to the application again, clicked the statement prompt, stared at the blank field. She could write three paragraphs of careful platitudes about balance and resilience, the false language of committees. She could also hear Dr. Albright’s assistant at the gala saying, What a lovely couple, so grounded. She’d deleted his email, but she hadn’t deleted the possibility he represented. Ugly and useful. She hated that the words made sense.

She opened a new document and titled it: Constraints. Then she typed as if building a protocol. No adjectives, just parameters. She wrote until the outline felt like a wall she could lean on without it collapsing. She sat with the phone for a long minute, thumb hovering, then pulled up his card from the crumpled corner of her bag where she’d shoved it after their first meeting.

She called. It rang twice. His voice came on roughened by sleep or disuse. “Elara?”

“I don’t want to small talk,” she said, staring at her cursor blinking in the grant portal. “I changed my mind. We’re going to do this. Exactly as outlined below. If you agree to every point, we can proceed. If you don’t, I will hang up, and we will never speak again.”

A pause. No attempt to charm. “I’m listening.”

She read.

“Duration is until the committee’s decision, with a hard stop at four months unless mutually extended. We present as a couple only at public-facing events relevant to my work. No unplanned appearances. You do not show up at my office without prior confirmation.”

“Okay.”

“Physical contact is limited to what photographs require. Handholding, arm around the back, a brief kiss on the cheek if strictly necessary. You don’t touch me otherwise, and you never initiate anything intimate without my verbal consent in the moment.”

“Understood.”

“You do not record anything without explicit permission. No notes in your phone during private time. You provide me any material you intend to publish that involves me, my name, my work, or our arrangement, one week in advance. I have veto power. If I say no, it doesn’t run. Not reworked, not anonymized, not anything.”

“That’s fair,” he said, and she could hear the click of a lamp, the soft thud of him sitting up. “Go on.”

“We build a backstory this weekend. We rehearse it. It’s simple and boring. We do not improvise. No grand gestures. No surprises.”

“Copy.”

“You do not speak for me in public about my work, my personality, or our fake private life, unless we have agreed ahead of time on the words. You don’t answer questions directed at me. You redirect politely, or you shut up. I’ll do the same.”

He breathed out, almost a laugh, then caught it. “Got it.”

“Boundaries,” she said, eyes closing for a second. “We do not ask each other personal questions not necessary for the backstory. You don’t dig into my past, my family, my health, my… you leave it alone. I will do the same with you. We do not use anything we learn in private for the article or for leverage.”

“Elara,” he said softly. “Yes. I agree.”

“Budget,” she continued. “You will invoice me at the end of each month for your time at an agreed hourly rate, itemized. We can discuss the rate tomorrow. No gifts of significant value exchanged to sell this. No expensive displays. It should be plausible for two people with our incomes. We split checks in public if necessary.”

“Practical. Fine.”

“Exit clause stands,” she said. “Either of us can terminate with twenty-four hours’ notice. If you violate any of these terms, the termination is immediate. You will not publish anything about me, our arrangement, or this process, ever, without my written consent. Even if I end it. Especially if I end it.”

“That’s already in my email,” he said. “I’ll put it in writing again if you want.”

“I do,” she said. “We draft a signed agreement. I’ll have my colleague in admin glance over it to make sure it’s airtight.”

Another quiet beat, like he was absorbing the scaffolding she’d built to hold back the chaos. “Okay.”

“We start with the donor gala,” she said. “You will meet me at the venue thirty minutes early. You will wear a dark suit, no novelty ties, nothing that draws attention. You will not drink more than one alcoholic beverage. You will not leave my side for longer than five minutes without telling me where you’re going. You will not make me hunt for you.”

He exhaled. “I can follow instructions.”

“You will also,” she added, the last line forming as she said it, “remember that this is a job. You don’t try to be my boyfriend. You don’t try to fix me. You don’t… push. You play your part and then you go home.”

Silence. Then: “Elara?”

“What.”

“I can do all of that,” he said. “And I’ll put every one of those points in a document and send it by morning. But I want to say this now so it isn’t a surprise later: I will protect you in rooms where people think they can take shots at you because they’re bored or threatened. That doesn’t break your rules. It’s the reason you called.”

She hated that his voice did something warm to the base of her throat. She focused on the screen. “Protect me by not making a scene.”

“I won’t,” he said. “I’ll make it easy.”

“I don’t believe in easy,” she said. “I believe in controlled variables. We create them. We stick to them. And when this is over, so are we.”

“I hear you.”

She opened her eyes. The prompt field stared back, patient. “Email me the contract. I’ll redline. If it’s acceptable, we’ll meet at eleven tomorrow at Rhea’s on Colorado. Neutral space.”

“I’ll be there,” he said. “Thank you for—”

“This isn’t gratitude,” she cut in. “It’s survival.”

“Then we’ll survive it,” he said, voice steadier now. “Good night, Dr. Vance.”

She didn’t answer that. She hung up, the click louder than it should have been in the quiet office, and set the phone down next to her keyboard like it might burn through the desk. She went back to the grant portal and typed into the “Professional Stability Statement” box: I maintain a consistent support network that allows me to prioritize my research objectives and meet all professional obligations with reliability.

It was true enough. It would have to be. The universe didn’t care about optics, but the gatekeepers did, and for once, she would use their rules against them. She saved the draft. The cursor stopped blinking.

Her inbox pinged five minutes later. Subject line: Agreement v2. No adjectives. Bullet points. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, opened it, and began to edit.