“That’s ridiculous,” Adam said. Outside the room, he could hear a woman arguing with a hotel employee about whether she had reserved a king or a queen bed. “Why would I reserve a queen-sized bed?” the woman was yelling. “I mean, look at us? Do you think we fit in a queen-sized bed?” Inside the room, the air became heavier. He swirled the whisky in his glass, focusing his eyes on the liquid. He didn’t dare raise them in case the truth was written all over his face, which he was sure it was.

Of course there was no shark. There was no colleague in Canada, no research on bull shark sightings either. All it had taken was a few big words, a few fancy numbers, some made-up firsthand testimonials from people whose names he had gotten out of a phone book. Later, when the search came up empty, they could frame it as a mystery, add in some CGI re-enactments, a few dramatic shots of Adam forlornly staring out over the lake.

“What did you do, pay all those people on the news to say they had seen it?” Yasmine asked. “That must have been hard.”

It had been pretty easy, actually. The first person only wanted a new windshield for his snowmobile. The second took four hundred in cash and a bottle of vodka. They were more excited about being on the news than anything else, saying things like, “We were out in our boat when we seen it. Grandpa thought it was some new kind of bass, but bass ain’t got no head like that.”

One of them must have talked. The only other people who knew were Mark and his publicist, and they wouldn’t tell anyone, their careers were riding on it, too. It had been two years since Adam had had anything picked up by Shark Week, and people at the other stations were starting to forget he existed at all. At first he thought it was a good thing: it was time for him to spend more time on his research. But after a few months, something happened that he’s sure, deep down, he always knew would happen if he quit television: he got fucking bored. All those years being so self-righteous, pretending he hated being on TV and how it was beneath him, and it turned out that it was the television part that got his fire going, it was the television part that he loved.

“You’re crazy,” he said to Yasmine.

“Am I? I talked to seven different marine biologists, and they all think your data is fraudulent.”

“Fraudulent?” He was still staring at the swirling liquid, and he felt each syllable fall out of his mouth and sink to the bottom of the glass. “Wait, what?” he said suddenly, looking up at her. “How did you get my data?”