Chapter 3

At ten o'clock that night, I dialed Jason's number for the third time.

"Hello?" An unfamiliar woman's voice came through the phone.

There was the distinct whir of lab machines in the background.

I was caught off guard for a moment. "Is Jason there?"

"Oh, looking for Jason?" Her voice had a lilt at the end. "We just wrapped up going over some experiment results. He's headed to the break room. And you are?"

Her tone had this slight pause, like she already knew who I was.

I forced myself to stay calm. "I'm his girlfriend."

There was a soft laugh on the other end. "Oh, you must be Sophia, right? Jason brings you up all the time."

The way she called me so sweetly made my fingers tighten around the phone.

"Fiona? Who's calling?" Jason called out as he walked over.

"Your girlfriend," Fiona said, holding onto the phone for a moment. "She says she needs to talk to you."

After a bit of shuffling on the other end, Jason's voice finally came through clear. "Sophia?"

He sounded a bit out of breath, and I could hear the clatter of a keyboard in the background. "I was just about to call you. We finally finished the follow-up experiments. Fiona's algorithm optimization is a game-changer. The simulation results show..."

He was talking faster and faster, and all those technical terms felt like a wall between us.

I gripped my phone, suddenly realizing it had been ages since I'd seen him this excited.

"So we can totally take this further." Jason called out to Fiona in the background. "Fiona, check out this data..."

I could hear papers rustling, and Fiona chimed in clearly, "With the Monte Carlo simulation, we can tighten the error margin by 0.3 percent more."

"Exactly," Jason sounded almost giddy. "I'll rerun the whole thing tomorrow."

I stood on my dorm balcony, the early autumn wind slipping coolly down my collar.

On the other end, their heated discussion spilled through the line, with words like "DFT calculations" and "lattice matching" sounding like a language I was never meant to understand, shutting me out completely.

"Sophia? Are you still listening?" Jason's voice suddenly came closer.

My voice was rough. "I'm here."

"Sorry, I got a bit too caught up," he finally sounded a little apologetic, but his excitement quickly took over again. "Once this project is finished, maybe Fiona and I can apply for something together."

I abruptly ended the call.

My warped reflection flickered on the phone screen as it lit up and faded to black.

The next morning, a WhatsApp message popped up on my phone.

[Sorry I got so wrapped up in the discussion last night. Didn't mean to ignore you. Just sent off the final draft of my paper. I've been busy lately.]

I stared at that period for a long time.

When did he stop adding emojis at the end of his texts?

I tried to stop caring so much about Jason.

I was among the first to get into the library at 6 a.m.

I poured all my focus into my senior project: a neural network-based financial risk control model.

Watching the code pile up and the progress bar move forward gave me a solid sense of accomplishment.

My phone buzzed.

I glanced at it. It was a message from Jason. [What have you been up to lately?]

The cursor blinked in the reply box for a good ten seconds before I finally typed: [Working on my senior project.]

I hit send and locked my phone.

It was strange. There was a time when I'd stay up all night, clutching my phone, waiting for his reply. Now, I could calmly set my phone face down on the desk and get back to refining my algorithm.

At lunch in the cafeteria, my roommate Vivian slid into the seat across from me, holding her tray.

"How come I haven't seen you video chatting with your prodigy boyfriend lately?" she said, stuffing food into her mouth. "Weren't you two basically inseparable before?"

I picked up a piece of meat. "He's busy."

"So busy that he can't even shoot you a text?" Vivian made a face. "Honestly, you should've chilled out ages ago. Dating a genius who started college at thirteen? It's like chasing after a rocket."

I didn't respond, but somewhere deep down, I had to admit she had a point.

For the past year, I'd been like some kind of devoted fangirl, desperately trying to wrap my head around all those wild theories Jason loved to talk about just so I could keep up with him for a few seconds when we video chatted.

I downloaded every paper he ever mentioned, even though most of them were so over my head that I couldn't even get through the abstract.

I even snuck into a quantum mechanics class in the physics department, but my brain just short-circuited when they got to the Schrödinger equation.

The joke was, I honestly thought doing all that would let me step into his universe, even just a little.

On my way back to the dorm that evening, I passed by the brand-new research building for the Information Technology Department.

Through the glass walls, I could see the lights were still burning in the top-floor lab.

I bet Jason is probably deep in discussion with Fiona about some world-shaking topic in Kinborough.

My phone buzzed again.

Jason sent me a photo of a machine I'd never seen before. Its display packed with complex, squiggly data lines.

The caption read: [Finally got it up and running today.]

I could make out his fuzzy reflection in the screen.

He was grinning so wide, his eyes lit up just like when he got his first paper published in Nano Letters.

This time, I wasn't the one he wanted to share it with.

I locked my phone and slipped it back into my pocket.

Turned out, letting go of a genius was way easier than trying to keep up with him.