In short, she was way above his pay grade. Fifty-two-year-old, divorced professors of mid-eighteenth-century American history didn’t pick up women like her in taverns; they certainly didn’t get picked up by women like her, well, anywhere. It was unnerving, seeing her at his computer, drinking his coffee, using his record player—but maybe he was overreacting.

He took a deeper sip of his coffee. The warm liquid felt good against his dry throat, the vapors battling the slight pounding in his skull. It really was foolish to drink so much on a weeknight—usually he kept the real benders for the weekends—but then, he hadn’t had many occasions to celebrate like that. Sure, he’d finished papers before, had published many, all the way back to his PhD thesis that had ended up in the Cambridge Historical Journal, leading to his recruitment by Harvard’s history department. But that paper—a detailed exploration of the relationship between John Hancock and Samuel Adams based on a trove of original letters he’d discovered tucked into a notebook of Ben Franklin’s on loan to Widener Library from a collector in London—wasn’t even in the same league as what he was about to accomplish.

Thinking of what was coming—what was just a handful of days away—buoyed him as he stepped deeper into his study. He could only imagine what his colleagues were going to say when they read his paper. The surprise, the utter awe, even better—the envy. Charles felt himself start to tremble with joy, even through his hangover, at the thought of the thunderclap that would move through the various universities. And then, the icing on the cake—Adrian Jensen, that foppish, haughty, egotist—

His thoughts paused as he noticed the woman had gone back to the computer, and as he continued toward the desk, she turned the laptop so that he could see the screen.

To his surprise, it wasn’t open to an email server. It was open to something he instantly recognized. He stopped, halfway past the coffee table, right beside a shelf lined with books about the Boston Tea Party.

“That’s my paper,” he said.

She nodded, tapping her long fingernails against the mouse.

“Yes. Really interesting. I stumbled onto it while looking for my emails. It’s fascinating. I’ve always considered myself a Revolutionary War buff, but I’ve never read anything like this before.”