Chapter 98 Bonus Chapter 26: The Lab Where She Stayed Beside Him

Chapter 98 Bonus Chapter 26: The Lab Where She Stayed Beside Him
When Nathan was in the lab, he could not afford distraction, so Chloe sat off to the side. She brought a book or her laptop and worked on her own advertising copy. Once in a while, she would look up at him, watching him focus on a pipette or microscope for a few seconds before lowering her head again.
Sometimes the corners of her mouth lifted without her even realizing it.
Once, Nathan was waiting on a PCR result.
The run would take more than an hour. He could not leave. He could only wait.
He turned around, intending to tell Chloe to go eat without him, and found her asleep on the lab bench.
The bench was cold stainless steel, covered with a layer of blue absorbent paper. Chloe had pillowed her face on that thin sheet, head turned to one side, hair scattered over her shoulders. A few strands hung beside her cheek, moving faintly with each breath.
Her lashes were long. When her eyes were closed, they looked like two little fans. Every now and then, they trembled lightly, as if she were dreaming of something that required her attention.
Her laptop was still open. On the screen was an unfinished advertising proposal, the cursor blinking at the end of the third paragraph. Beside it sat a cup of coffee gone cold and half a sandwich wrapped in plastic, only two bites missing.
Nathan stood there and looked at her for a while.
He saw the faint shadows under her eyes. She must have stayed up late again the night before.
She was always like this. Internship during the day. Coursework at night. Coming to see him on weekends. Running herself ragged.
He walked over, took off his jacket, and draped it gently over her shoulders.
Chloe shifted. Her cheek rubbed against the sleeve, like a little cat.
Thank God she did not wake up.
Nathan returned to the bench and continued waiting for the result.
Later, the PCR result was excellent. The gene fragment amplified cleanly, the band bright and clear, better than he had expected. His advisor, Professor Mario, looked at it and said it was good. They could continue the following week.
Nathan thought later that maybe it was because Chloe had been there.
Things like that happened many times.
He later discovered that whenever Chloe stayed with him in the lab, his experiments went especially smoothly.
Maybe it was because he was in a better mood when she was there.
No.
Not really.
It was because when she was there, he felt at ease.
The year Chloe disappeared, Nathan was in his second year of graduate school.
For a while, he barely went to the lab.
Every morning when he woke, the first thing he did was check his phone for news of Chloe.
Every time, there was nothing.
He lived that way for three months.
Professor Mario called more than a dozen times. Nathan never answered. It was not that he did not want to answer. He simply did not know what to say.
In the end, Mario drove directly to his apartment.
Nathan opened the door.
He stood there in a wrinkled T-shirt he had not changed for days, the collar crooked, half the hem tucked into his waistband. His hair was a mess. He had not shaved. Blue stubble shadowed his jaw. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he had lost so much weight that his cheekbones stood out sharply, his collarbones stark beneath his skin.
Mario looked at him once and said nothing.
He walked inside and sat on the couch. Clothes were piled there, unfolded. He shifted them aside to clear a small patch of space.
The apartment was a wreck.
Takeout boxes and empty water bottles cluttered the floor. Chloe's photographs covered the coffee table. One of them was the photo Nathan had secretly taken of her asleep in the lab, her face pillowed on her arm, her hair spilled across the table.
Mario looked at those photos and was silent for a while.
“Your project,” he said at last. “I kept it for you.”
Nathan froze.
He had thought Mario had come to scold him. To tell him he was neglecting his work, wasting time, unworthy of being his student.
But Mario did none of that.
“When you come back, it’ll be there.”
Mario stood, then patted Nathan once on the shoulder.
It was not a heavy touch, but Nathan felt as if something had been placed there.
“Whether you find her or not is your business,” Mario said. “But the research can’t stop. This is what you do. You know better than anyone that those patients can’t wait.”
Then he left.
Nathan stood at the door and watched Mario’s car disappear around the corner. It was an old dark-blue Toyota, with a scratch across the bumper. The car turned at the intersection and vanished.
Nathan crouched down and covered his face.
That night, he thought for a long time.
He thought of those patients. People he had never met, but people he had been studying for all the same.
They were waiting too.
Waiting for medicine. Waiting for hope. Waiting for good news that might never come.
He and they were actually the same.
The next morning, he showered, shaved, and put on clean clothes.
He stood in front of the mirror for a while. The person in the glass was much thinner. Cheekbones too high. Eyes too deep. A stranger.
Nathan stared at him for a few seconds.
Then he turned and went out.
He went to the lab.
The day Nathan returned to the lab, Professor Mario said nothing.
He simply wiped down Nathan’s bench, arranged the instruments, and placed every piece of equipment exactly where it belonged. Finally, he set Nathan’s project folder on the table.
Blue plastic cover. Corners already worn white.
“Check the data again,” Mario said.
Nathan nodded.
He sat at the bench and opened the folder.
He had not touched the data in three months. The papers had curled slightly at the edges, but the numbers were still the same numbers. At first, he could not take them in.
His mind was still full of Chloe.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Then he opened them again.
He forced himself to keep reading.
Line by line.
Number by number.
That day, he worked very late.