I pack my laptop and files, all but one, into the briefcase I’ve carried since my days in graduate school with Jackie, and head out the door, a pleasant smile on my face that I hope hides my trickery from Morgan. I want to buy as much time as I can this summer, stretch out the work long enough to get Sonia on track.

In my car, driving from rural Maryland into the congestion of Washington, DC, I think about how I found the physical locus and how Lorenzo’s work on verbal and semantic fluency identified the protein. I knew it; Lin and Lorenzo knew it. But Morgan doesn’t need to know it. Not yet.

Chapter Twenty-five

TWENTY-FIVE

My office is something between a cave and a monk’s cell, but less luxurious given the pair of desks and chairs crammed inside. Also, it lacks a window, unless you count the glass pane in the door that gives the work space all the privacy of a fishbowl. A scarf and purse, both on the tattered side of wear, sit on one of the desks. I recognize both as Lin’s.

Morgan shows me inside and leaves me to get settled. He says he’ll come back in a few minutes to take me around the lab, get me set up with an ID tag, and show me where the copier room and the printer area are. I now know nothing I do here will be unseen by other eyes.

Oddly, I don’t care. The idea of seeing Lin again, of talking to her and working with her, has me as high as a schoolgirl at her first dance.

“Oh my god,” a wisp of a voice says from the doorway.

Lin Kwan is a small woman. I often told Patrick she could fit in one of my pants legs—and I’m only five and a half feet and 120 soaking wet, thanks to the stress diet I’ve been on for the past several months. Everything about her is small: her voice, her almond eyes, the sleek bob that barely reaches below her ears. Lin’s breasts and ass make me look like a Peter Paul Rubens model. But her brain—her brain is a leviathan of gray matter. It would have to be; MIT doesn’t hand out dual PhDs for nothing.

Like me, Lin is a neurolinguist. Unlike me, she’s a medical doctor, a surgeon, to be specific. She left her practice fixing brains fifteen years ago, when she was in her late forties, and moved to Boston. Five years later, she left with a doctorate in each hand, one in cognitive science, one in linguistics. If anyone can make me feel like the class dunce, it’s Lin.

And I love her for it. She sets the bar as high as Everest.