The Cold Room Divorce

Synopsis

The sirens were screaming in the dead of night. By the time I burst into the cold room, the final batch of cell samples had already hit critical temperature. The monitors next to the liquid nitrogen tanks were strobing red, and a thin layer of frost was already sweating off the cryoboxes. Three years of work—our final preclinical batch—gone in an instant. Colt Remington stood in the doorway, his suit jacket draped over Vivian Rhodes' shoulders, his arm shielding her from the chaos. Vivian was trembling, her fingers white as she clutched his sleeve. He glanced at me, his voice hitting me colder than the alarm. "It's just a batch of samples, Sloane. Don't scare her over a few cells." My fingers dug into the metal edge of the heavy door until it burned. In that moment, I didn't look at Vivian. I didn't even ask why her name was on the access logs for a restricted lab. I just reached up and unclipped my ID badge. The plastic snap echoed in the room like a gunshot. Over four years of marriage, I'd heard every variation of that line. "Vivian just got back to the city; she's still finding her feet. Give her a break." "Remington Group bankrolls this lab. What's the harm in her looking at the data?" "Sloane, drop the ‘dedicated scientist' act. You married me for the Remington resources, didn't you?" Once, I would have fought back. I would have explained that this project had been mine since undergrad, long before his family's firm ever cut a check. I would have pointed out that Vivian's big thesis was practically a carbon copy of my early models. But tonight, I realized I was done explaining.