“Don’t sing,” she told him, reaching for her keys. “Come in and we’ll talk. I’ll blow out the candle.”
Chapter Eight
JESSICA
What is truth? Truth can be less important than trust.
—“How I Lied about My Name and Discovered My Truth,” a TED Talk by Jon M. Wright
Jessica had always believed success came from achieving excellence through preparation, not winging it. One month into her job, and she was definitely successful—but only at praying she would soon have a clue what she was doing.
Instead of seeing patients, she now provided monitoring and consultation for those who directed studies of the patients she’d trained to treat. Which largely meant she shuffled paper. At least so far. The only person who could truly advise her about what she was actually supposed to be doing happened to be her boss, roommate, and lover. “I didn’t just bring you here because I’m in love with you,” he’d whispered one harried afternoon, after she’d spent the morning writing and revising a report she worried didn’t even make sense. “I have all these people working for me who excel at specific things, but you’re the only one I trust implicitly to help me oversee the big picture.”
From then on, when Jon gave her something to review and approve, which was constantly, she read the material assiduously before attaching her name but didn’t dare do anything more than correct stray typos. She wasn’t about to test his belief in her by admitting she should have done that fellowship first and that she was in over her head.
Marco had been an absolute godsend as he helped her navigate the inevitable on-the-job pitfalls: Don’t fuck with any lab protocols until you okay it with Arjun. Lori understands organizational structure better than anyone other than Jon. Philip is your go-to guy for any kind of analysis—but don’t chew gum around him because he can’t handle repetitive noise. Marco’s friendship and candor, particularly over lunch in the on-site café, had gone a long way to helping her settle in. Still, it wasn’t as though she could ask him what, exactly, she had been hired to do.
Now Jessica Meyers, MD, director of medical monitoring and consulting, had little choice but to sculpt her role from the head-spinning job description Jon had provided. At least one task—review and sign off on documents with respect to medical relevance—was straightforward. When she wasn’t signing off on the endless files that came to her virtual desktop for approval, she was collaborating with management, awaiting Jon’s infrequent arrival in the office (in order to interact with her primary academic thought leader), and trying to figure out how to organize and lead clinical development advisory boards. This task was more difficult than it seemed: Yulia got too competitive with Arjun, so they had to be split up; Janet, while brilliant, rarely posited an opinion unless she was angry; et cetera, et cetera.
Some days, she half wondered whether her position had been copied and pasted from a job posting on a recruitment site. She almost wished it had been, so she could call whoever had gotten the same position at another company and ask, How do you know when you’ve figured out what you’re supposed to be doing?
Whenever she thought about what she was missing in the three-year fellowship she’d abruptly declined, she assuaged her small stabs of regret by telling herself that, instead of merely becoming a medical practitioner, she was part of a team of brilliant scientists building something so monumental it would change medicine forever.
Today, Jessica finally had the breakthrough she’d been waiting for: a moment of genuine insight proving to Jon, and more importantly herself, she actually had something to contribute. The fact that Kate, the head of clinical trials—who’d legitimately but far too publicly questioned her credentials—was to be the first recipient of the director of medical monitoring’s actual monitoring made it that much sweeter.
Jessica considered herself competitive, not vindictive or jealous, and certainly had no intention of doing anything more than flexing a little identify program risks and create and implement mitigation strategies muscle.
Not wanting to make her inquiry look like a power play, she didn’t call Kate down to her office but instead made the trip up to the third floor. As she exited the elevator and entered the restricted area, known affectionately as Area 51, her presence was not acknowledged by the small army of lab techs. Kate, however, spotted her immediately and was halfway across the lab before Jessica reached her work area.
“Do you have a minute?” Jessica asked with unaccustomed confidence.
“For?” Kate asked brusquely.
“Maybe we should talk in your office?”
“No need.” Kate didn’t seem to take the hint that she might not want to be questioned in front of her staff.
Jessica lowered her voice. “I have some concerns about variations in some of the most recent leukemia biomarker trials.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the lab techs glance over before quickly refocusing on his task.
Kate folded her arms.
“The data shows wide fluctuation in the results between our in-house and outsourced testing,” said Jessica, holding up the printout she’d brought as evidence.
“I’m aware,” Kate said with a dismissive sniff. “Those results come from a lab we’re no longer using due to their poor quality controls.”
“Why aren’t we doing all of our diagnostic work in-house?”
“Everyone outsources to corroborate their findings,” Kate said, as if the very words were exhausting.
“But we’re outsourcing some of the initial testing, too. In one trial, we did all of it in-house. In another, we subcontracted all of it. And in the third, some of the samples were tested in-house and some were sent out.”
“Even a place as well funded as Cancura can’t do everything in-house.”
Jessica moved several inches closer, not wanting to broadcast what she was about to say. “If we outsource the initial findings as well as the corroboration, aren’t we leaving ourselves open to errors by others?”
“As long as they’re all tested according to the
