The night I decided to end Melissa’s career, there was a tiny American flag peeling off the side of my chipped NASA mug.

I’d stuck that flag sticker on there during a over-the-top Fourth of July barbecue at Nathan’s apartment the summer before. We’d grilled hot dogs and veggie skewers on a cramped balcony while someone down the block blasted Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” on repeat. At some point, a pack of cheap stickers got passed around, all stars and stripes and bald eagles wearing sunglasses. I slapped one onto my mug, laughing that if I was going to drink government-funded coffee, it might as well look patriotic.

Now that same mug sat on my coffee table, a faint ring of cold coffee staining a trivia score sheet from the night Nathan and I met. My laptop glowed beside it, screen split between two open emails: one from Dr. Harrison, subject line: “Follow-up on quantum navigation review,” and one from Nathan, subject line: “Can we talk about Melissa?”

The flag sticker had started curling up on one corner, the edges turning gray from too many dishwasher cycles. I caught myself picking at it with my thumbnail, worrying the edge the way I’d been worrying the same question for days.

How far was too far when someone had already pushed you off the ledge?

My name is Emily. I’m an aerospace engineer, which means for most of my life I’ve been the person people come to when something breaks. Satellites, routers, car engines, someone’s old iMac that “just stopped turning on.” Give me a system, a set of parameters, and a problem, and I can usually fix it.

People, though—that’s trickier. Feelings don’t follow equations. Trust doesn’t debug as easily as a faulty script. And betrayal doesn’t have a neat error log.

Nathan and I met in the most on-brand way possible for two nerds in their late twenties: trivia night at a bar where the sticky tables were held together by duct tape and hope.

The bar sat on the corner of a busy street in Seattle, American flag magnet crooked on the beer fridge behind the counter. A bored bartender flipped channels between baseball and cable news while a chalkboard promised “$5 domestic drafts” in handwriting that got shakier with each line. The place smelled like fried pickles, spilled beer, and the faint ghost of someone’s cologne from a better night.

My roommate had dragged me there because their usual fourth for trivia had bailed. I’d shown up in my faded Johnson Space Center hoodie, fully prepared to lose every category that wasn’t Space, Science, or Extremely Specific Early 2000s Pop Punk.

When the “Space Exploration” round came up, the rest of the bar groaned.

I sat up straighter.

So did the guy at the next table over.

The host read the first question about Apollo-era navigation systems, and my hand moved at the same time his did. Our teams both submitted the same answer, same wording, same little doodle of a command module in the corner.

After the round, he leaned over, grinned, and said, “Okay, I have to know—are you just a space nerd, or is this, like, your actual thing?”

“Both,” I said. “I’m Emily. I design satellite components for a research lab.”

His eyes lit up. “I’m Nathan. Aerospace consultant. I help airlines and aviation companies pretend they understand physics when they really just want to save fuel and squeeze in more seats.”

We spent the rest of the night trading answers and accidentally teaming up on every science category, our teams half-jokingly calling us traitors. It felt easy in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time. By the time we closed out our tabs, my cheeks hurt from smiling.

For two years, it stayed easy.

We cooked together in my tiny apartment kitchen, bumping hips while stirring sauces and arguing about orbital insertion angles. On weekends we hiked trails just outside the city, stopping at overlooks to point out constellations even when the light pollution barely let us see the brightest stars. We watched documentaries and paused them every ten minutes to fact-check something or argue with the narrator.

We had a rhythm. I’d come home from the lab and drop my bag by the door. Nathan would be at the stove, still in his button-down with sleeves rolled to his elbows, talking about some stubborn client who thought wings worked better if they “looked more aerodynamic.”

I’d pour myself iced tea into the NASA mug and tell him about thermal management issues or simulation runs. He’d listen, ask good questions, poke holes in my logic when I needed it. I’d do the same for him with his reports and slide decks.

We didn’t just like each other’s bodies; we liked each other’s minds. That mattered to both of us.

Then he went to his high school reunion.

He came back with two things: a box of yearbook photos he insisted on showing me, and a reintroduced character in his life—Melissa.

“You’d like her,” he said that first night, flipping through pictures on his phone. “She’s working on her PhD in theoretical physics at UW. Brilliant, kind of intense. We used to do science fair together in high school. She built a particle detector out of, like, spare microwave parts.”

“Sounds… safe,” I said, and he laughed.

“She’s coming to trivia next week,” he added. “I told her about Space Round.” He bumped my shoulder. “You’ll destroy her.”

If only.

Melissa arrived at trivia in an oversized university hoodie and leggings, hair piled in a messy bun that was somehow still Instagram-ready. She walked like the room belonged to her, not in a loud way, but in the quiet, unbothered way of someone who has never had to ask twice for attention.

“You must be Emily,” she said, sliding into the booth opposite me like we were already halfway through a conversation. “Nathan’s told me so much about you. Satellite girl, right?”

“Engineer,” I said lightly. “I work at the lab in Redmond, mostly on thermal and structural design.”

“Right,” she said, like she was filing that away in a drawer labeled Not That Impressive. “I’m drowning in quantum field theory right now, so it’s nice to talk to someone who actually touches hardware.”

It sounded like a compliment. Maybe it was meant as one.

At first, I tried to like her.

She was smart. That part wasn’t an act. She could explain complex concepts without notes, could rattle off equations as easily as I could memorize phone numbers. She talked fast, her words tumbling over each other, switching from physics to politics to the latest peer-reviewed mess in some journal.

I asked questions because I was genuinely interested. I like learning things, and theoretical physics is an area where I know just enough to follow the conversation but not enough to get bored.

But whenever she answered me, her tone shifted. She’d slow way down and exaggerate her hand gestures, like she was explaining algebra to a kid.

“Okay, so imagine you’re on a playground,” she said once, walking me through a basic quantum entanglement analogy I’d heard fifty times before.

I’d nodded, even though I could have drawn the state vectors from memory.

Then she turned to Nathan and, without lowering her voice, said, “Wasn’t it so cute how Emily tried to understand that paper I sent? I love how curious she is.”

Nathan chuckled, not unkindly. “She’s smarter than you think,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Melissa answered, smiling at me like she was patting a dog. “Curiosity is its own kind of intelligence.”

It was subtle at first. A tilted head here, a gentle apology there.

At dinner one night, when the conversation shifted to her research, she launched into a story about a seminar she’d led.

“Sorry,” she said, turning to me. “I always forget not everyone wants to talk about quantum chaos for fun. I must be boring you with the smart people stuff.”

“I’m fine,” I said, stabbing my salad.

Nathan didn’t say anything. He took a sip of his beer and changed the subject.

These little things stacked up.

She started calling me “lab tech” instead of engineer. At first I corrected her. Then I realized that every time I did, she’d smile and say, “Oh, right! You do a little design work too, don’t you?”

“A little design work” apparently included leading failure analysis for a multimillion-dollar satellite bus.

The first time something really snapped for me was trivia night—the one that should have been a victory lap.

The category was Space Exploration again. Our whole table looked at me.

I answered every question without hesitation. Specific launch dates, mission names, telemetry trivia no one had any right knowing outside of a very specific corner of the internet. Nathan scribbled down my answers, high-fiving me after each one.

We won the round by a mile.

“Wow,” Melissa said, clapping slowly. “You’re like a little encyclopedia.”

“It’s literally her job,” Nathan said, smiling.

“Sure,” she said. “I just mean… some people are really good at memorizing facts. It’s a skill. Doesn’t always translate to deeper understanding, but–”

She shrugged.

“Okay, ouch,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.

“No, no,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean that as an insult. I think recall is important. It’s just… different from doing actual theory. You know?”

The table went quiet in that awkward way where everyone is pretending they didn’t hear what they all definitely heard.

Nathan chuckled and nudged me. “Maybe we should give other teams a chance next week,” he joked. “You’re too good at this.”

That line lodged itself in my brain like shrapnel.

Maybe we should give other teams a chance.

On its own, it was nothing. Combined with everything else, it was the first time I heard agreement in his voice when Melissa underestimated me.

After that, the pattern changed.

When our router at home died and I crouched under the console, tracing cables and checking settings, Nathan stood over me.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked. “Maybe we should just call support.”

“I literally helped design the network topology for our test facility,” I said. “I think I can handle a home router.”

“I’m just saying,” he added, hands up. “Sometimes you get lucky with that stuff.”

I fixed it in eight minutes.

When he asked me to look over some Python scripts for one of his clients’ simulation models, I spent a Saturday afternoon cleaning up the code, optimizing a few loops, restructuring the data handling. He thanked me, kissed my cheek, and then—later that week—casually mentioned he’d sent the scripts to Melissa “just to get another pair of eyes.”

“She said there were a few errors,” he told me over takeout.

“Where?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She just said something about your approach being… practical but maybe not as rigorous as it could be.”

I opened the code and went through it line by line. No errors. Just a very clean, very efficient script.

I didn’t say anything.

I wish I had.

Instead, I let the resentment simmer.

The breaking point was Nathan’s company party.

It was one of those events that tried to be casual and upscale at the same time: rooftop downtown, string lights zigzagging over the deck, cocktail napkins with the company logo printed in navy and red. Someone had draped a full-sized American flag along one railing “for ambiance” and positioned a ring light for selfies in front of it.

I was talking to Nathan’s boss about propulsion systems, enjoying the rare moment of being treated like a professional and not someone’s plus-one. He’d read one of my papers on thermal management for satellite buses and asked thoughtful questions. I felt seen.

Then Melissa glided over, wine glass in hand.

“Hey,” she said, touching Nathan’s arm before turning to his boss. “Oh, you met Emily!” Her voice shifted into that bright, performative tone. “She’s Nathan’s girlfriend. She works as a lab tech at some place out in Redmond.”

His boss frowned slightly. “I thought you were the engineer who wrote that thermal management paper,” he said to me. “The one our team was passing around last quarter?”

“That’s me,” I said. “I–”

“Oh!” Melissa laughed, loud enough for nearby conversations to pause. “That must be someone else with her name. The math in that paper is pretty advanced.” She turned back to Nathan’s boss. “I mean, no offense. Emily’s brilliant with her hands.”

My throat went tight.

“Actually,” I said slowly, “that paper is mine. I can pull up the DOI if you want.”

But Melissa had already looped her arm through Nathan’s and steered him toward another conversation, like she’d decided that moment had served its purpose.

On the drive home, city lights flashing across his face, Nathan cleared his throat.

“Melissa’s worried about us,” he said.

I stared out at the passing traffic. “About us how?”

“She thinks relationships work better when people are intellectual equals,” he said carefully. “She’s just… concerned that we might not be as compatible long-term as we think.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “And what level am I on, exactly?”

He paused.

“She noticed you struggle with abstract concepts,” he said finally, “and that you rely more on practical application. She made some valid points about our conversations being kind of… surface level.”

Everything inside me went still.

We had spent the previous week arguing about the ethical implications of sending human consciousness to Mars as data instead of bodies. We had diagrammed thought experiments on my whiteboard. We had stayed up until 2 A.M. because neither of us wanted to drop the thread.

“Surface level,” I repeated.

He winced. “That’s not my word. I’m just… relaying.”

“But you agree,” I said. “You keep saying she made valid points.”

He hesitated, which told me more than any answer could have.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that she sees things about people sometimes that they don’t see about themselves. She’s very perceptive.”

Heat crawled up my neck. The urge to scream, to throw something, to pull up every paper I’d ever written and staple them to his forehead battled with a colder, sharper instinct.

I realized in that moment that if I got angry, if I raised my voice, if I demanded he defend me, Melissa would win twice. She’d get to be the calm, rational observer while I played the emotional, reactive girlfriend who “couldn’t handle criticism.”

So I did something that surprised even me.

I dropped it.

Out loud, anyway.

“Okay,” I said. “If that’s what you think.”

Inside, gears started turning.

I decided to play dumb.

On purpose.

I started asking Nathan to explain things he knew I already understood. I’d furrow my brow when he brought up a client’s problem and say, “Wait, I don’t get it. Can you break that down for me?” I started taking longer to answer trivia questions, pretending to second-guess myself.

With Melissa, I leaned even harder into the role.

“Sorry,” I’d say during her long monologues about quantum chaos. “Could you slow down? I’m not as good with theory.”

She would light up.

“Of course,” she’d say, flipping her hair back. “I forget sometimes. It’s just second nature to me.”

She started referring to me as “Nathan’s sweet, simple girl” in this tone that was meant to sound affectionate.

It never sounded that way to me.

All the while, I was building something.

Melissa’s advisor, Dr. Harrison, and I had met years before at a conference in Houston. We’d bonded over a mutual hatred of bad data visualization and kept in touch. We’d co-authored three papers since then, combining his theoretical models with my lab’s hardware and simulation results.

He didn’t know Melissa was in my orbit. Academia is small, but not that small, and Nathan’s personal life hadn’t intersected my collaboration with Dr. Harrison—until I made sure it did.

I emailed him about a project I’d been sketching out: quantum applications in satellite navigation. It wasn’t a total lie. I had a folder on my desktop with half-formed ideas on using quantum effects to improve positioning in noisy environments.

“I’d love your perspective on the theoretical side,” I wrote.

He responded within an hour.

“Funny timing,” he wrote. “I have a doctoral candidate working in a similar area. Maybe you could take a look at some of her work? It would be helpful to have someone with your practical experience weigh in.”

He sent me three of Melissa’s papers in progress and a draft of her dissertation proposal.

She had no idea.

I told myself, at first, that I was just going to give honest feedback. If her work was solid, I’d say so. If it wasn’t, I’d point out the issues.

I opened the first paper with an engineer’s focus, NASA mug in hand. The little flag sticker scratched my knuckle as I scrolled.

At a glance, the work looked impressive. Dense. Full of equations that would scare off most engineers who hadn’t cracked open a math textbook since grad school. But the more I read, the more something felt off.

Her “novel” approach to mitigating random phase noise in quantum systems looked suspiciously like a framework I’d seen in a decade-old paper, just rephrased and buried under a different notation. Her simulations made assumptions that ignored whole categories of environmental disturbance any satellite in orbit would face.

I went line by line, highlighting sections that didn’t make sense, scribbling notes in a digital document.

Her code was a mess. Overcomplicated where it didn’t need to be, brittle where it needed robustness. It reminded me of someone trying to show off by making things harder than they had to be.

I wrote a detailed review, sticking to facts, pointing out issues without editorializing. Dr. Harrison responded with gratitude and asked if I’d be willing to look at a few more pieces.

That’s when I noticed it.

A paragraph that felt… familiar. The phrasing, the structure, the way the argument unfolded.

I couldn’t place it at first. It nagged at me for hours. Finally, I dug into the archive in the back of my brain and remembered a footnote from a talk I’d once attended about under-cited Russian work in quantum information theory.

I went hunting.

The Russian paper wasn’t easy to find. It took an hour of searching, a trip through a half-translated conference proceedings site, and a janky PDF that looked like it had been scanned in someone’s basement. But when I found it and compared it to Melissa’s draft, my stomach dropped.

The paragraph was almost identical. Not word for word—but close enough that if you’d laid tracing paper over one and then the other, the silhouette would match.

I started checking other sections.

I found another match.

And another.

By the time I was done, I had counted seventeen distinct instances across four separate documents where Melissa had lifted text, structure, or ideas without proper attribution.

Seventeen.

I sat back and stared at the number I’d scribbled in the top corner of my notes: 17.

Seventeen instances of what any review board would classify as academic dishonesty.

The engineer part of me kicked in. I didn’t rage. I compiled.

I built a document with side-by-side excerpts: original Russian text on the left, Melissa’s versions on the right, highlighted in alternating colors. I included publication details, page numbers, dates. I wrote a cover email to Dr. Harrison that was as neutral as I could make it.

“I’m concerned,” I wrote, “that there may be significant issues with citation and originality in this work. I’ve attached a comparison document for your review.”

I hovered over “Send” for a long time.

Part of me whispered that this was revenge. That I was doing this to get back at a woman who had spent months trying to convince my boyfriend I was beneath him.

Another part of me—the part that had spent years in labs where people’s lives depended on us getting the math right—whispered something else.

If you don’t send this, and her work gets published, you’ll be complicit.

I clicked “Send.”

Dr. Harrison called within the hour.

“Emily,” he said, voice tight. “I… how did I miss this?”

“You’re busy,” I said. “You have a lot of students. It’s easier to see patterns from the outside.”

“Seventeen?” he asked.

“Seventeen,” I confirmed.

The review board convened. Melissa went in expecting to discuss her timeline for defense. Instead, she was handed a printed packet—my packet—and asked to explain herself.

Her funding was pulled that same week. She was given two weeks to vacate her office.

I found out the outcome from Dr. Harrison and, indirectly, from Nathan.

Nathan called me the night the decision came through, his words tripping over each other.

“They’re saying Melissa plagiarized,” he said. “She says someone set her up. She’s freaking out. They’re forcing her out of the program.”

“That’s… serious,” I said.

“She needs support,” he continued. “She keeps saying she doesn’t know who did this to her. She’s made a lot of enemies, but I don’t know who would go this far. Could you go check on her?”

I hesitated.

“You want me,” I said slowly, “to comfort the woman who’s been trying to convince you I’m too dumb for you?”

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” he said. “But you’re… kind, Em. You understand pressure. Maybe you could just be there for her?”

Kind.

That word felt heavier than it used to.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I picked up a box of cookies from a bakery near campus and brewed a thermos of tea, because my mother raised me to never show up at someone’s crisis empty-handed.

Melissa’s office was on the fourth floor of a building that should’ve been condemned ten years ago. The hallway smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet cleaner. Her nameplate was still on the door.

I knocked.

“Come in,” she called, voice hoarse.

Her office was even smaller than I’d imagined. Bookshelves lined the walls, sagging under the weight of journals and binders. Papers were stacked in precarious towers on every flat surface. A tiny window looked out over a parking lot, the blinds crooked.

She sat at her desk, shoulders hunched, hair falling out of its bun. The skin around her eyes was red and raw.

“Hey,” I said softly, setting the cookies and tea on the corner of her desk. “Nathan told me what happened. I’m so sorry.”

She looked up at me, suspicion flashing across her face, quickly replaced by exhaustion.

“Everyone suddenly cares,” she muttered. “Where were they when I was working eighty-hour weeks?”

She gestured to the chair opposite her desk. I sat down.

“They showed me… this,” she said, picking up a stapled packet. It was my comparison document, with the review board’s watermark on the first page. “They said I copied my work. That I stole. Do you know how insane that is?”

“Plagiarism is serious,” I said carefully.

“I know what plagiarism is,” she snapped, then deflated. “I just… those ideas are everywhere. Everyone’s building on everyone else’s work. You can’t prove intent.”

I glanced at the packet. I could see my own highlights through the thin paper.

“They said there were seventeen instances,” she whispered. “Seventeen. Like I had some pattern.”

My stomach clenched.

“That’s a lot,” I said.

She buried her face in her hands. “Someone did this to me,” she said. “Someone went digging through obscure Russian papers. Who even does that?”

Me, I thought.

Out loud, I said nothing.

She walked me through the board’s findings, pointing out paragraphs, claiming coincidence. I leaned in and pretended to read them for the first time.

“Do you see anything wrong with their conclusions?” she asked desperately.

“It looks… thorough,” I said.

Her face crumpled.

She started crying again, big, ugly sobs that shook her shoulders. I sat there, hands gripping my knees under the desk, and forced my face to stay neutral.

This is what you wanted, I reminded myself. You wanted consequences. You wanted her out of your life.

But wanting something in theory and watching it unfold in front of you are two different experiences.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I checked it while she fumbled for another tissue.

Nathan: Has she said anything about who might have reported her?

I stared at the text for a long moment.

She’s really upset, I typed back. I don’t think she knows. Maybe just give her some space.

He sent back: This is killing her. I feel so bad.

I put my phone away.

“Do you think Nathan will still talk to me after this?” Melissa asked suddenly, looking up through wet lashes. “Do you think anyone will?”

“Of course,” I said automatically. “This… doesn’t change who you are as a person.”

The words felt like cardboard.

She thanked me for coming. When I left, she hugged me so tightly I could feel her ribs.

“You’re a good friend,” she said.

I walked back to my car with my heart pounding in my throat. I sat in the driver’s seat for a full five minutes before I could put the key in the ignition.

The next week blurred.

Nathan texted constantly.

She’s not answering my calls.

She’s not in the group chat.

Do you think she’ll be okay?

He talked about her like she was some fallen star whose trajectory he’d just noticed, forgetting that I was in the gravitational field too.

Meanwhile, my own brain finally caught up to something I’d been avoiding.

He believed her.

He’d believed her when she said I struggled with abstract concepts. When she framed my work as “hands-on” and “practical” like those were euphemisms for “less than.” When she said our conversations were surface level, like the hours we spent talking about ethics and philosophy and cosmic loneliness meant nothing.

All she had to do was plant a seed, and he watered it.

At work, I tried to bury myself in simulations. I ran thermal models until the numbers blurred. I stayed late, my chair squeaking in the near-empty lab, the only sound the hum of servers and the occasional squeal of the ancient coffee machine.

Cara, my coworker and unofficial office big sister, found me one morning pouring coffee into my NASA mug like it contained the meaning of life.

“You look like you slept in your car,” she said, leaning against the counter.

“I slept in my bed,” I said. “Barely.”

“Everything okay with Nathan?” she asked.

“Things are… complicated,” I said, which was the truth and also a cop-out.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said gently. “But you’ve been more intense lately. And that’s saying something.”

I laughed weakly. “Work stress.”

She didn’t push.

Days later, Nathan came over with takeout and a nervous energy that made my skin buzz.

We ate on my couch, a documentary about deep sea creatures playing in the background. Halfway through a segment about bioluminescent fish, he paused the TV.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“Dangerous,” I said automatically.

He smiled a little, then sobered.

“About what Melissa said,” he continued. “About us.”

I set my chopsticks down.

“Okay,” I said.

“I think I was unfair to you,” he said. “I… let her get in my head.”

“How?” I asked.

He exhaled. “I’ve always been a little insecure about not having a PhD,” he admitted. “Consulting feels… less impressive sometimes. Melissa made me feel like I was part of this elite intellectual club. And when she started making comments about you, I… believed her. Because if she thought I was smart, then she must be right about who wasn’t.”

It was ugly in its honesty.

“Do you actually think I struggle with abstract concepts?” I asked.

He stared at his hands. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I did for a while. She was convincing.”

I felt anger rise like a tide.

“Did our conversation about consciousness and Mars feel surface level to you?” I asked. “Before she said it was?”

“No,” he admitted.

“But once she labeled it that way, you retroactively downgraded it,” I said.

He winced.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

I told him everything.

About Dr. Harrison. About the papers. About the code. About the seventeen instances. About the email, the review board, the office clearing.

I didn’t spare details. I didn’t soften the parts where my motives were messy.

Nathan’s face went pale, then paler.

“You… did this?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “She did this. I found it.”

“Why?” he whispered.

I listed reasons.

The router incident. The code. The party. The car ride home. His words about “my level.” His willingness to take her assessment over two years of lived experience with me.

“You let her rewrite me,” I said. “In your head. And you liked the story because it made you feel bigger.”

He didn’t try to deny it.

“Is the plagiarism real?” he asked quietly. “Or did you… look for something to–”

I stared at him, hurt flaring hotter than any triumph I’d felt.

“If you’re going to accuse me of fabricating evidence,” I said, “you can leave now.”

He shook his head quickly. “I’m not accusing you. I just…” He rubbed his temples. “I need to understand.”

I opened my laptop and pulled up the comparison document. I sat next to him and made him read.

When he reached the seventeenth instance, he put his face in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Apologies don’t change the fact that the first thing you questioned was my integrity,” I said.

We talked for hours. He admitted to insecurities I’d suspected but never fully understood. I admitted to the cold satisfaction I’d felt when I realized I could be the one to take Melissa down.

“I don’t know if I can trust you again,” I said finally.

“I don’t know if I deserve it,” he replied.

The next day, he showed up with boxes. He moved his things out of my apartment without argument. Watching him carry his toothbrush out of my bathroom felt surreal.

When he left, the apartment felt both emptier and more mine.

The NASA mug stayed.

Three days later, Dr. Harrison’s email came.

He thanked me thoroughly for my detailed review. He said my work had prompted a wider audit. Two other grad students had come forward to report issues in collaborations with Melissa.

“This has opened a bigger conversation about academic integrity in my department,” he wrote.

I read the email three times.

This wasn’t just about a petty rivalry anymore. It was bigger. Messier. More consequential.

I reached out to someone who’d always had a clear moral compass: my grad school mentor, Professor Julian Lozano.

I wrote him a long email explaining everything. Melissa. Nathan. The plagiarism. My motives.

He replied with a Zoom link.

“We’re not doing this over text,” he wrote.

On the call, he listened without interrupting, his tired face framed by an overflowing bookshelf. When I finished, he leaned back.

“You know what I’m going to say,” he said.

“That I shouldn’t have gone looking for dirt,” I said.

“No,” he said. “That you did the right thing.”

I blinked.

“Julian,” I said. “My motives were–”

“Messy,” he finished. “Sure. Welcome to being human. But you found real fraud. You documented it properly. You reported it. If you’d found seventeen instances of fabrication in test data for a satellite and said nothing because you didn’t want to rock the boat, would that be ethical?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Same principle,” he replied. “The integrity of the field matters more than any one person’s career. Including yours. Including hers. Your anger got you to look closely, but the truth is still the truth.”

“It ruined her,” I said.

“She ruined herself when she copied those paragraphs,” he said. “You flipped on the lights. That’s all.”

I wasn’t fully convinced, but his words stuck.

Two weeks after Nathan moved out, I got the email from Melissa.

Subject: I know it was you.

I almost didn’t open it.

When I did, I braced for rage. For accusations. For threats.

Instead, I got something else.

She wrote that she’d gone through Dr. Harrison’s emails while meeting with him about “next steps.” She’d seen my name on the attachments.

“You were thorough,” she wrote. “I underestimated you. Again.”

There was no emoji to soften it. No dig in the wording. Just that.

She admitted, in writing, that the overlaps with the Russian work were real.

“I convinced myself they were incidental,” she wrote. “That the ideas were obvious enough that everyone would arrive at them. But I knew when I was copying. I lied to myself because I was behind and scared.”

She said she didn’t blame me for reporting it.

“You told the truth,” she wrote. “I didn’t.”

I stared at the screen for a long time, then forwarded the email to Nathan.

He called less than ten minutes later.

“I’m an idiot,” he said as soon as I answered.

“I’m not going to argue with you,” I said.

He laughed, a short, broken sound.

He apologized again, more quietly this time. Not a performance. Just a tired confession.

“I’d like to try counseling,” he said. “With you. If you’re willing.”

I surprised myself by saying yes.

Therapy was awkward at first. We sat on opposite ends of a beige couch while a woman in a cardigan asked us questions we’d both avoided.

She had us talk about how we’d grown up—me in a blue-collar Texas town where people thought NASA was magic, him in a suburb where being “smart” meant advanced placement classes and relentless comparison.

She pointed out patterns.

Nathan had learned to measure his worth in credentials and titles. Melissa embodied the kind of prestige he’d always chased. I embodied the kind of competence he’d come to take for granted.

I had learned to avoid conflict by outworking everyone and everything. When cornered, I didn’t argue. I strategized.

“You chose revenge over direct communication,” the therapist said gently.

“I chose consequences,” I said.

“Those things are not mutually exclusive,” she replied. “The question is: what did it cost you?”

Three months later, the answer was: a lot, and also not enough to make me wish I hadn’t done it.

Nathan and I got better at talking. At saying, “That hurt,” in the moment instead of months later in a therapist’s office. He learned to catch his own reflex to defer to people with fancier degrees. I learned to recognize when my anger was masking fear.

We were still together, but the relationship we had now wasn’t the same one that started with trivia and late-night debates.

It was heavier. More deliberate. Less romantic, in a rom-com sense, and more… grown.

One Tuesday afternoon, my boss called me into her office.

I walked in prepared for a reprimand about something I’d missed. Instead, she smiled and slid an envelope across her desk.

“We’re promoting you,” she said.

“To what?” I asked, because my brain never quite believes good news the first time.

“Senior engineer,” she said. “You’ll be leading the navigation systems team on the next-gen satellite project. There’s a pay bump.” She named a number. Seventeen percent raise.

I laughed when I heard it.

“That funny?” she asked.

“Just… a number I’ve been thinking about a lot,” I said.

I walked back to my desk in a daze. My coworkers clapped me on the back. Cara hugged me and whispered, “Told you.”

My NASA mug sat where I’d left it, the tiny flag sticker still peeling.

That night, Nathan insisted on throwing a celebration dinner. He booked a table at a place with white tablecloths and too many forks. Our friends filled the seats. One of them stuck a little American flag toothpick in my dessert when the waiter set it down.

Nathan raised his glass.

“To Emily,” he said, voice steady. “Senior engineer, published researcher, destroyer of bugs in both code and hardware. She’s the smartest person in this room, and if you argue with me, I’ll make you prove otherwise.”

I rolled my eyes, but my chest went warm.

Later, on the drive home, traffic lights washing our faces red and green, he reached for my hand on the center console.

“I meant it,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

Weeks passed. Life settled into a new normal.

Then Cara caught me in the break room again.

“Academic gossip,” she said, eyes wide. “Want it?”

“Always,” I said.

“Your favorite theoretical physicist has left the program,” she said.

“Melissa?” I asked, even though I knew.

“Full withdrawal,” Cara confirmed. “Word is, she moved back to Ohio to work in her family’s commercial real estate business. Apparently, academia wasn’t… hospitable anymore.”

I felt something twist in my gut. Relief. Guilt. Something in between.

“Thanks for telling me,” I said.

That weekend, I told Nathan.

We sat on my couch, the same one where we’d watched that deep-sea documentary months ago. My NASA mug sat on the coffee table between us, half full of tea.

“Cara heard Melissa left the program,” I said. “Moved back home.”

He rubbed his jaw. “I wondered,” he said. “I haven’t heard from her.”

“She emailed me,” I said. “Admitted what she did. Said she didn’t blame me.”

He nodded slowly.

“Do you feel bad?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And also no.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Me too.”

We lapsed into silence.

“Do you ever regret it?” he asked finally. “Reporting her?”

I thought about the seventeen plagiarized passages. About the grad students who’d come forward afterward. About the future papers that wouldn’t be built on stolen work.

“No,” I said. “I regret not standing up for myself sooner. I regret giving you and her so much power over how I saw my own mind. But I don’t regret telling the truth.”

He nodded.

Months turned into a year.

Nathan and I kept going to therapy. We had good weeks and bad ones. We had nights where we cooked together like we used to, arguing about documentaries in the glow of the TV, and nights where we slept back-to-back, the space between us full of things unsaid.

We also had new things. Honest things.

Like the night he admitted he’d started second-guessing himself every time he questioned me, afraid he was slipping back into old patterns.

“I don’t want to be that guy again,” he said.

“Then don’t,” I said. “Just… check your reasons. If you think I’m wrong because I’m me, that’s a problem. If you think I’m wrong because of the math, we can talk about it.”

We laughed. We argued. We grew.

The next time trivia night rolled around, we went.

Walking into the bar felt like stepping back in time. Same sticky tables. Same crooked flag magnet on the beer fridge. Same host, older now, with more gray in his beard.

“You two back to dominate space round?” he asked when he saw us.

“We’ll see,” I said.

When the category appeared, the rest of the bar groaned.

Nathan looked at me. “You’re up,” he said.

“You sure?” I asked, arching a brow.

“Emily,” he said, pen poised over the answer sheet. “You’ve been designing satellites for six years and leading a navigation team. If I don’t trust you on this, I should be banned from this bar.”

I smiled and started writing.

We didn’t get a perfect score—someone had changed the projected launch window on one mission I hadn’t bothered to follow—but we won the round.

“Show-off,” Nathan murmured, pride warm in his voice.

On the way out, I glanced back at the bar. The crooked flag magnet caught the light for a moment, the colors faded from too many summers.

Later that night, back at my apartment, I rinsed out my NASA mug and set it on the drying rack. The little sticker flag had finally peeled halfway off, curling up at the corner like it was waving.

I pressed it back down with my thumb.

Some symbols you keep even when they’re a little worn. Not because they’re perfect, but because of all the nights they’ve seen you through.

Seventeen stolen paragraphs ended Melissa’s academic career. One chipped mug with a fading flag watched me end a friendship, almost lose a relationship, and then decide, carefully, to fight for something better.

I don’t know if Nathan and I will last forever. There’s no equation for that. No simulation I can run that will tell me if, ten years from now, we’ll still be on the same couch, arguing about documentaries.

But I do know this: if anyone ever tries to convince him again that I’m too dumb for him, he won’t believe them.

And if they try, well.

I’ve always been very good at fixing things.

Even if sometimes, fixing them starts with burning down the parts that were never built right in the first place.

The thing about rebuilding your life—even when nothing looks visibly broken from the outside—is that it happens in layers. Slow ones. Invisible ones. Ones you don’t even realize have shifted until you look back and see the old shape of yourself like an imprint in wet concrete.

Three months after trivia night, after the promotion, after therapy sessions that alternated between productive breakthroughs and long stretches of silence, I realized I hadn’t told my parents anything. Not about Melissa. Not about Nathan. Not about the promotion. Not about the version of myself I’d become—harder in some places, softer in others.

My parents lived in Austin, in the same house where I’d built my first crystal radio in middle school. My dad still kept the cardboard-and-copper-wire contraption on a dusty shelf in his garage like it was a trophy. Growing up, they’d encouraged everything I touched academically—but emotional things? We did not talk about those.

So when I booked a flight home for a long weekend, I didn’t expect catharsis. Or even understanding.

But I needed distance—from the lab, from Nathan, from the weight of the choices I’d made.

My mom picked me up at the airport in her rattling Subaru, Texas heat punching me in the face the moment I stepped outside. She hugged me like I’d been gone for years, not months.

“You look tired,” she said, cupping my face.

“I look like someone who lives on coffee and simulations,” I said.

She snorted. “So, Tuesday?”

At home, she made iced tea the way only she could—sweet enough to qualify as a dessert, poured over lemon slices. An American flag magnet clung crookedly to their fridge door, holding up a faded grocery list and a postcard Nathan and I had sent from Olympic National Park the year before.

“Still seeing that boy?” she asked casually.

I hesitated.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“Isn’t it always at your age?” she said, waving her hand. “Sit. Tell me everything.”

I didn’t tell her everything—not the revenge, not the plagiarism, not the seventeen instances—but I told her enough. That someone had disrespected me. That Nathan had believed them over me. That I was trying to decide whether the relationship was worth repairing.

My mother’s face shifted into that rare expression she reserved for things that truly upset her.

“Honey,” she said quietly. “If someone can be convinced you’re less than them that quickly, what will happen the next time someone whispers in his ear?”

It was a simple question. A fair one.

“He’s changing,” I said softly. “We both are.”

“Good,” she said. “But don’t shrink yourself to make the math work. You’ve never been that kind of girl.”

That night, lying in my childhood bed covered in glow-in-the-dark star stickers from a decade ago, I stared at the ceiling and let her words settle.

Don’t shrink yourself.

When I flew back to Seattle, something in me felt steadier.

Nathan picked me up from the airport even though I hadn’t asked him to. He stood beside his car holding a cardboard sign that said WELCOME BACK, ROCKET SCIENTIST in messy Sharpie letters. People stared. He didn’t care.

“You didn’t have to come,” I said, though I was secretly grateful.

“I know,” he said. “But I wanted to.”

On the drive home, he talked nervously about small things—new sandwich place near his office, some space news he’d read, the weather. His hands tightened on the wheel every time the conversation stalled.

“I talked to my mom,” I said finally.

He swallowed. “About us?”

“About me,” I corrected. “About what I’m willing to accept.”

He nodded. “And?”

I looked out the window at the skyline.

“I’m not going to shrink anymore,” I said.

He let out a shaky exhale. “Good. Because I don’t want you smaller. I want you—exactly as you are. Even when it scares me.”

That admission hung between us like an overdue truth.

A few weeks later, Dr. Harrison emailed again—this time with a proposal.

“I’ve secured funding for a cross-disciplinary project based on your quantum navigation idea,” he wrote. “I would like you to co-lead the practical engineering portion.”

The budget attached had another number that made me blink.

$295,000.

A real grant. A real project. A real chance to step into something bigger.

I brought the email to work and showed Cara, who immediately shrieked into her salad.

“You HAVE to do it,” she said. “This is career-making. This is tenure-track-level prestige without the tenure track.”

“It’s also time-consuming,” I said, biting my lip. “And politically messy. People know about… Melissa.”

“The people who matter know you did the right thing,” she said. “The rest can deal with it.”

When I told Nathan, he grinned so hard it looked painful.

“Em, that’s incredible,” he said. “Seriously. I’m proud of you.”

“You’re not… bothered by the Harrison connection?” I asked.

He shook his head slowly.

“I was,” he admitted. “But I’ve had time to sit with it. You didn’t create the plagiarism. You uncovered it. I don’t love how you got involved—but I understand why. And I’m done letting my discomfort rewrite what actually happened.”

That felt like growth.

I accepted the project.

Work got busier—late nights, early mornings, simulations that crashed at 3 A.M., meetings with theoretical physicists who spoke in metaphors and equations interchangeably. I loved it.

Strangely, so did Nathan. Not the work—he hated math he couldn’t visualize—but the version of me that emerged. Confident. Focused. Unapologetically sharp.

One night, after I came home at nearly midnight smelling faintly like solder and cheap lab coffee, he looked at me across the couch.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Sure.”

“If Melissa hadn’t been in the picture,” he said slowly, “do you think we still would have hit this… wall?”

I considered it.

“Eventually,” I said. “Not because of her. Because of you. Because of the way you ranked intelligence like it was a hierarchy instead of a spectrum. Because of the way I avoided confrontation and then let resentment calcify. We were going to break somewhere. She just picked the spot.”

He nodded, staring at his hands.

“Can I ask you something back?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“If you had known what I was doing—the research reviews, the investigation—would you have stopped me?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Thought.

“I would have told you to be careful,” he said. “I would have told you to think about your motives. But no… I wouldn’t have stopped you. Because you weren’t wrong. And whether or not revenge was mixed in, the truth still mattered.”

It was the most mature answer he’d ever given.

Months turned into more months.

The grant project gained traction. Journalists reached out. Conferences invited us to speak. The lab director started dropping by my office “just to chat,” which everyone knew was code for “We’re prepping you for leadership.”

Nathan and I got better, slowly. Therapy helped. Honesty helped more.

There were still days when the past sat between us like an extra chair at the table. Still moments when he hesitated a second too long before agreeing with me on something technical. Still flashes of my own defensiveness when I caught him frowning at his phone near a notification from an academic group chat.

But we talked about it. That was the difference.

One evening, while chopping vegetables for dinner, he said,

“I think the reason Melissa got to me wasn’t just insecurity. It was because part of me believed intelligence has to look a certain way. A degree. A title. A type of confidence. You don’t present yours that way, so I underestimated it.”

“And now?” I asked, pausing with my knife mid-air.

“Now,” he said, “I see you build satellites from scratch while I struggle to install a printer driver. So I’ve recalibrated.”

I flicked a carrot slice at him. He caught it in his mouth and grinned.

We laughed together, loudly, freely. It felt like the beginning of something—not new, but rebuilt.

The final shift happened nearly a year after everything had blown up.

I received a letter. A physical one.

The handwriting was familiar.

Melissa.

My hands trembled as I opened it.

Inside was a single page.

Emily,

I’m writing because I finally have the distance to see everything clearly.

Losing my career felt like the world ending, but stepping away showed me exactly how much I’d been running on fear. Fear of failing. Fear of not being special. Fear of people seeing the cracks.

You didn’t create those cracks. You saw them. And you didn’t look away.

I don’t expect forgiveness. I’m not asking for friendship. I just wanted to say: you were right.

And I was cruel to you. Not because you were dumb, but because you threatened a story I told myself about what intelligence should look like.

I hope your work goes far. I hope your life goes far.

—M.

I folded the letter and sat with it for a long time.

Not triumphant.
Not vindicated.
Just… human.

I showed it to Nathan that night.

He read it slowly, jaw tightening at some lines, softening at others.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Like I can finally exhale,” I said.

He nodded. “Me too.”

We sat on the couch, my head on his shoulder, the letter resting on the coffee table. My NASA mug sat beside it, the little flag sticker now barely hanging on. I pressed it down again out of habit.

Maybe some symbols weren’t meant to stay perfect. Maybe their value came from surviving storms.

Nathan kissed the top of my head.

“You know,” he murmured, “I think the real reason we’re okay now is because you stopped letting other people define you. And I stopped letting my insecurities define us.”

I smiled.

“We’re still working on it,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “But we’re working on it together.”

The truth was, I didn’t know how our story would end. Whether we’d get married someday or drift apart. Whether the wounds would fully heal or just scar over.

But I knew this:

I was no longer the woman who shrank herself.

And he was no longer the man who believed the wrong person.

And sometimes, that was enough to build something real.

As I got up to wash my mug for the night, the peeling flag sticker fluttered at the corner. I smoothed it again with my thumb.

Not perfect. But still holding.

Kind of like us.

And for the first time in a long time, that felt like hope.