Jessica took a deep breath. “You remember when I asked you about some discrepancies I found in test results from that leukemia study a few months ago?”
“And Jon employed a third vendor to run another series of tests, and they matched our in-house results?”
“Exactly,” she said.
“Too exactly,” he reiterated.
“What would you say if I told you I’ve learned the Revelate was never truly designed to detect disease that is already identifiable through traditional means of testing?”
Philip turned toward the glass window and checked in both directions. “I would have nothing to say that would be of help.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, wondering what had rattled him. “Who do you think I should talk to about something like this?”
“Graham,” he whispered.
“Your friend who used to work here?”
Philip tilted his head and scrunched his face. “Until he was fired.”
“Fired? I was told he was lured away by another med-tech start-up.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Then what did happen?”
“He didn’t understand that there are some things you just don’t say out loud here,” he said, turning to leave. “Lorna is waiting for me.”
Like what? But he’d already hurried out the door and down the hallway.
“Did you know a data analyst named Graham?” Jessica asked Marco over lunch. “He left right before I came.”
Marco looked up from the salad he was splitting between two plates. “Of course. Why do you ask?”
“Philip made kind of an odd comment about him.”
“Philip made an odd comment?” repeated Marco, feigning shock. “About his friend who kept vintage ThunderCats action figures on his desk? Quelle surprise.”
“They’re probably worth a fortune,” Jessica said, trying not to judge. “In any case, Olivia told me Graham was poached by a Silicon Valley start-up, but Philip said he was fired.”
“They’re both right,” Marco said. “When Jon discovered Graham was talking to someone else, he was let go.”
“Just like that?”
“At the risk of repeating myself, everyone wants to cure cancer, but nobody thinks about the level of security that requires,” said Marco. “Graham had a big mouth and needed to be reminded of the strength of our confidentiality clause.”
“Gotcha,” she said, pushing her half of the truffle mac and cheese around her plate. It made sense.
“You’re barely eating,” Marco said. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a taste for the soggy tuna salad and withered carrot sticks at the AHS cafeteria.”
Jessica half-heartedly speared a few noodles. “I’m just not all that hungry. It’s been a long morning.”
“Second Wednesday of the month, which means you were communing with Komodo Kate.”
“I managed to avoid being bitten by her or Arjun,” Jessica said, even though she felt like they’d ripped a chunk out of her.
“I can’t say I’d mind being nibbled on by Arjun,” Marco said with a giggle.
Mindful of how closely Jon had held the secret, Jessica stopped herself from telling Marco that Arjun was a willing victim of Kate’s venom. Her friendship with Marco had relaxed to the point where he shared personal details about life and love while she offered tidbits about her past while maintaining that work was her life for now.
Which wasn’t exactly a lie.
“I have a question,” she said.
“The answer is yes. You should set up a Tinder profile in both Chicago and Omaha. Though now that I say that, the very idea of Omaha Tinder makes me shudder.”
“Very funny.”
“And I’m not kidding, Jessica. You’re so smart and good-looking, I really do find it hard to believe you’re sleeping alone. You would tell me if there was someone, wouldn’t you?”
“Seriously,” she said, shutting him down. “Did you know Jon instructed Kate, Arjun, and their team to devote all their time and resources to getting the new tests up and running—”
“Why is that even a topic of discussion?”
“—without making any modifications that will enable us to confirm the results in patients with already detectable disease?”
“Hold up,” Marco said. “What do they suggest we do about Randy and AHS, or the FDA, for that matter?”
“Talk to Jon, naturally,” Jessica said.
Now it was Marco’s turn to push his mac and cheese around on the plate. “Well, we can only assume Jon has this all worked out and is three steps ahead of everyone else, as always.”
“And if he’s not?”
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
Jessica came home expecting the apartment to be dark and empty but was surprised to find Jon sitting on the couch with his feet on the ottoman, watching CNN.
“Hi, babe,” he said, sending an air-kiss in her direction.
He had never beaten her home on a weekday before. Not only that, she had never actually seen him relax and watch TV. She would have felt badly about disrupting his stolen moment of peace and quiet if she hadn’t spent the whole afternoon continuing to obsess about her conversation with Kate and Arjun.
She set her purse down on the counter and walked into the living room, preparing for the worst. “I’m sorry, but I need to talk about work.”
To his credit, Jon simply muted the TV and patted the couch beside him. “What’s up?”
She didn’t sit. “I have questions, and I need answers in order to do my job properly.”
“Sounds eminently reasonable,” Jon said. “Talk to me.”
Instead of thinking before speaking, which she’d long found to be the most successful way to make a point without sounding emotional, irrational, or too much like a woman in a man’s world, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me the Revelate was never designed to detect full-blown diseases, only specific precursors?”
“Because that’s not entirely true,” Jon said.
“Not according to Kate and Arjun,” she said.
“They don’t know the whole story.”
“Which is?”
“A few months ago, when I told you I employed another vendor to run a third set of tests—”
“That matched our in-house results?”
“The real story is that those results matched those of the lab we fired,” he said. “Ours were the outliers.”
“But what you showed me—”
“What I showed you was simply a copy of our in-house data.”
Which Philip must have suspected when he spotted the identical numbers. “My god, Jon. Why would you
