Chapter 2

“OH DEAR.” PROFESSORBianchi’s face had gone from cheerful to depressed as I talked him through the latest batch of data. The findings left by Tony, my predecessor, had been—well, exciting was an understatement. If they’d proven reproduceable, they would have represented a major breakthrough in chikungunya, my specialist area. But they weren’t proving reproduceable, and that was a problem.

The annoying thing was that Tony was long gone. He’d published his thesis to rippling excitement and had promptly been headhunted by a private lab for a permanent position. I’d been hired by the university on a one-year contract to tie up the loose ends. My task was supposed to be simple: repeat Tony’s experiments with a wider range of samples and prove that the results held up. The problem was, they didn’t. I’d repeated and repeated and repeated until I was blue in the face, but after the third attempt, I’d had to admit it. The effect Tony had found wasn’t just weaker, it wasn’t there at all.

In theory, I’d done my job. Pat on the back. Great work, Lyla. And in theory, disproving a false lead was as valuable and important as finding something new. The problem was that in practice, we all knew that wasn’t how it worked. Grant funding didn’t go to the scientists who found out something didn’t work. It went to the groups with sexy new discoveries and results that got everyone talking. No one wanted to publish a paper meticulously outlining the anatomy of a damp squib, no matter how good the research.

In my darker moments, sleepless, at 3 a.m., I’d blamed Tony. Perhaps he’d written his method up wrong. Maybe he’d even faked his results? But in my heart of hearts, and with my scientist’s head on, looking at the data, I knew it wasn’t Tony’s fault. He’d thrown a dozen dice and they’d all returned sixes. Just one of those things, and when I tried again on a much bigger scale, the pattern hadn’t held. But I was the one having to break the bad news, and deal with the fallout.

Up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t been worried about the fact that my contract at the university was about to expire—Professor Bianchi had more or less assured me that obtaining further funding was a formality. Now… well, now I could tell from his expression that I should be polishing up my CV. And I wasn’t looking forward to explaining at interviews the fact that I’d spent a full twelve months working on a highly exciting project and had absolutely fuck all to show for it.

“You’d better write it up,” Professor Bianchi said a little wearily. “And then we’ll have to see whether there’s anything that can be salvaged from it. Maybe something will come out of Gregor’s animal modeling.”

I bit my lip and nodded.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, and Professor Bianchi shrugged, the philosophical shrug of a man with tenure who’d wanted this to work out, but hadn’t hung his career on it.

“Not your fault, Lyla.”

“What do you think it means for the funding renewal?”

“Ah. Good point. Your contract’s up next month, isn’t it?”

“March, in fact,” I said quietly. “Ten weeks.”

Professor Bianchi nodded.

“I’ll speak to the grant committee. But…”

He trailed off. Don’t make any big purchases in the meantime, was the strong implication.

I forced a smile.

“Sure. Thanks. Listen, I…” I swallowed. Now wasn’t the time I’d have chosen to ask for time off, but in a way it didn’t matter. I could write up the paper just as well on Nico’s desert island as I could here, and I might as well take my holiday entitlement before the contract ended. “Would now be a bad time for me to take some leave? Nico, my boyfriend, he’s been invited on this—” I stopped. I wasn’t 100 percent sure Professor Bianchi knew what a reality TV show was. The one time I’d referred to Big Brother, he’d assumed I was talking about George Orwell. And it didn’t exactly fit with the responsible in-demand professional image I was trying to project. “On a work trip,” I finished. “He’s asked me to come along. I can write the paper there; it’s probably easier than trying to fit it in around lab work.”

“Sure,” Professor Bianchi said, and his face… did I imagine a flicker of relief? “Of course. And hopefully by the time you come back I’ll have heard from the grant committee. Thanks again, Lyla, for all your work on this. I know it’s never easy coming in with disappointing results.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. And then, since the interview was plainly over, I showed myself out of his office.

I SPENT THEbus ride back to east London watching the winter rain trickle down the steamed-up windows and considering my choices. I was thirty-two. All around me friends from university were buying up houses, settling down, having kids. My mum’s jokes about grandbabies had started to become slightly pointed. But here I was, stuck in a cycle of short-term post-docs that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Once, I’d dreamed of heading up my own team, my own lab, even. Talks about the dearth of women in STEM had made it all seem so possible—funding committees were crying out for driven female scientists, we were told.

In truth though, there’d been a healthy proportion of women in my cohort, at least when I started out. My first two bosses in the lab had been women. But the funding committees didn’t look any more kindly on us than they did on the men, and as the years ground on, more and more of my colleagues had been forced out by the reality of life in academic research. Maternity leave didn’t mesh well with funding deadlines and the pressurized race to results. Babies didn’t mix with tissue cultures that needed constant tending, cell lines that had to be split at ten o’clock at night, five in the morning, endless round-the-clock work, or else they’d wither and die. And mortgage providers didn’t like the uncertainty of short-term contracts. Every time I started a new job there was a narrow window of security when I was out of the probation period, but not yet under statutory notice of redundancy—and it never seemed to be long enough to get a foot on the ladder. Combined with Nico’s feast-or-famine line of work (and there’d been precious little feasting over the two-and-a-half years we’d been together), it made for a stressful existence. And the longer I’d been in the field, the more I realized that there was a ticking clock, and not just one relating to babies. The career pyramid for science was shallow—many researchers, very few lab heads—and the competition was astonishingly fierce. If you didn’t tick certain boxes by the time you were in your thirties, you just weren’t going to make it.

Maybe it was time to throw in the towel, admit once and for all that the dreams I’d held when I left uni were never going to happen. That I was never going to be able to fund my own lab. That Professor Lyla Santiago was never going to exist, would never give the keynote address at a prestigious academic conference, or be interviewed on This Week in Virology. With every year that ticked by, it was looking increasingly likely that I’d be forever a lowly post-doc, scrabbling around for my next short-term contract. And maybe it was time to face up to that and figure out what to do.

It didn’t help that Nico was only twenty-eight, and decidedly not ready to settle down in any way. He’d barely changed from the cute, wannabe actor I’d met almost three years ago, at a friend’s “Valentine’s Day Massacre” horror-themed party for pissed-off singletons. He’d been a disturbingly sexy Freddie Krueger; I’d cheated and borrowed a lab coat from work, spattered it with some fake blood. We’d mixed Bloody Marys in the kitchen, watched Friday the 13th on my friend’s couch, shrieking and hugging each other during the jump scares, and ended up snogging in the bathroom. The next day my friend had ribbed me about pulling out of my league.

For six months I’d almost forgotten his existence, the only reminder the occasional thirst-trap photos he posted on Instagram. They were… I mean, they were easy on the eye, I had to admit it, and they made a nice break to my workday. I’d be flicking through my phone on coffee break, and there would be Nico, sweatily tousled at the gym, all crunched abs and tangled dark hair. On the bus back from the university, there he’d be again, sprawled on a beach in the Algarve, tiny swimshorts stretched across his hips, smirking up at the camera from behind mirrored shades.

For half a year that was it—me single, bored, head down at work, barely thinking about the handsome actor I’d groped in my friend’s bathroom. And then one day, out of the blue, I posted an Instagram photo of myself. It was uncharacteristic. My normal feed was dinners I’d cooked and funny memes about the hell of working in academia. But I’d ordered a dress online and when it turned up it was almost comically undersized, the skirt just skimming my thighs, my boobs spilling out of the top. I posted it as a funny “what I ordered / what I got” pic, but I was aware that, while I wasn’t going to keep the dress, it also wasn’t exactly unflattering. It was about as un-me as it was possible to get, but it also squeezed me in the right places, and my tits did look pretty awesome.

The first comment was from Nico—just a string of chili peppers that made me laugh.

And the second was a reply from him to his own comment. It just said “Drink?”

A drink turned into drinks, which turned into dancing, which turned into tequila slammers and drunken snogging and, eventually, a shared Uber (which Nico promised to split, but never did). Nico, it turned out, lived around the corner from me in a house share in Dalston, but that night we ended up at my place—and, well, somehow he never quite moved out.

Two and a half years later, I was older, wiser, and considerably more jaded—facing up to the realities of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world on a researcher’s salary. My rent had gone up. My pay had not. I had started to think about plan B. Maybe even plan C. But Nico was still dreaming of Tinseltown, still refusing to sell his dinner jacket in case he one day needed to attend the BAFTAs or the Grammys. Nico was still fighting, still hustling for his dreams, and most days that was part of what I liked about him—his relentless optimism, his faith that one day his ship would come in.

But on a day like today, the grayest kind of gray London day, when even the sun seemed to have given up and gone back to bed, that optimism was a little hard to take.

When I got off the bus at Hackney Wick, the rain had turned to a stinging sleet, and I realized I’d left my umbrella at the lab. I half jogged the twenty minutes from the bus-stop, trying to shield my laptop from the worst of it, then stumped wearily up the three flights to our little flat in the rafters of a Victorian terrace house. When I had first brought Nico here, we’d run up, laughing, only stopping to kiss on the landing turns. Now I was chilled to the bone, and each flight felt steeper than the last. I had to will myself up the last set to my front door, and when I finally reached the top, it took me three tries for my numb fingers to get the key in the lock.

“I’m home!” I called as I peeled off my wet coat, though the flat was so small—just a bedroom, a bathroom, and an everything-else-room—that I didn’t really need to raise my voice.

The words had hardly left my lips when Nico appeared, mobile pressed to his ear, motioning me to keep quiet.

“Of course,” he was saying, in what I thought of as his actor voice, deeper, smoother, and more assured than he would have sounded on the phone to his mum or a mate. “Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.” There was a long pause, with the person on the other side evidently saying something, and Nico nodding with an attentive expression on his tanned, handsome face that was totally wasted on the person on the other end. At last, after a short back-and-forth of goodbyes, he hung up and danced down the hallway to throw his arms around me, lifting me up and whirling me around.

“Nico!” I managed. His grip was suffocatingly strong, and in the narrow hallway my foot caught the mirror as he swung me round, making it swing dangerously against the wall. “Nico, for God’s sake, put me down!”

He set me on my feet, but I could see that my reaction hadn’t dented his mood. He was grinning all over his face, his dark eyes quite literally sparkling with excitement. That expression had always seemed like the worst kind of cliché to me—from a scientific point of view, it’s not possible for eyes to change their reflective properties because something fun has happened—but I had to admit it was the only apt description for Nico right now.

“That was Baz,” he said. “The producer of One Perfect Couple.”

“The producer of what?”

“That’s its name.” Nico flicked his fringe out of his eyes. “The show. I told you.”

“You didn’t, but okay.”

“I did. But anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I sent him some pics and he loves both of us—”

“Wait, you sent over photos of me?” I was taken aback, but Nico was barely listening.

“—and he definitely wants to set up a meeting. He said we’re exactly the kind of couple they’re looking for. They want real authenticity, not the usual Love Island types.”

“Real authenticity?” I looked down at myself—crumpled T-shirt, wet jeans, old trainers for working in the lab. “Is that code for needs a wax and to lose five pounds off her arse?”

“Actually, he said you reminded him of Zooey Deschanel,” Nico said. “And by the way, your arse is perfect.”

“I notice you didn’t comment on the wax.”

“Look, stop taking the piss. You’re perfect, okay? I think so, and Baz agrees. He really likes that you’re a scientist. He said having a boffin on the show would be good for ratings, and as far as your arse goes, he said you were g—” He stopped, stumbled over whatever he’d been about to say, and then finished, “Very good-looking.”

“Okay, clearly that’s not what he actually said, Nico. Spit it out.”

“I, um… I can’t remember his exact words,” Nico said, but his ears were reddening, his invariable tell whenever he was lying, and I began to tickle him, digging my fingers into his ribs and the soft skin beneath his collar.

“Nico, what did he say?”

“Stop it!” he ordered, ducking away from me and trying not to laugh. “Lyla! I’m warning you—”

“So tell me what he said! If I’m going on this show—”

“If?”

“If. I have a right to know what the producer thinks of me. Or should I ask him?”

“Stop tickling me!”

“I’ll stop when you tell me what he said!”

“All right, all right! He said you were… girl-next-door fuckable.” He spoke the words slightly shame-facedly, acknowledging my reaction even before my expression of disgust had formed.

“What? That’s gross!”

“He didn’t mean it that way,” Nico added hastily, aware that he’d made a faux pas and anxious that I didn’t turn against the idea of going on the show. “He said I’m fantasy first boyfriend, if it makes you feel better.”

“What? No! It doesn’t make me feel better! That’s gross too, you’re twenty-eight. You shouldn’t be anyone’s first boyfriend!”

“Fantasy, Lil! That’s the point. You know, when you’re thirteen and you want a kissable poster on your bedroom wall—someone sexy but not too threatening. Zac Efron. Jacob Elordi. Personally, I think I’m a bit too old as well.” He threw a glance at what I knew was his own reflection in the mirror over my shoulder, appraising the laugh lines that were just starting to form at the corners of his eyes. “But you know, he’s just talking types, not saying that’s how he thinks of us.”

“Still.” I was barely mollified. Girl-next-door fuckable. Girl-next-door fuckable? Was it a compliment? No matter which word I put the stress on, it didn’t feel like one. “What else did he say? Any news on dates?”

Nico nodded.

“They want to move fast. It’s for a new reality TV network that’s launching later this year, so they’ve got a really tight deadline to get everything filmed and tied up.”

“Which means?” I followed him into the room that doubled as our living room and kitchen and watched as he put on the kettle.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but it sounded like they want to start filming in a matter of weeks. He kept saying the word asap.” He pronounced it as two syllables, ay-sap. “I’ll get my assistant onto you asap. The researchers will be in touch asap. That kind of thing.”

“Oh.” I was calculating in my head. “I mean… from my perspective that’s probably a good thing. I can get the time off now, but in a couple of months, who knows. Where are they filming?”

“Well, that’s the best bit—they’re aiming for the Love Island audience, so it’s being filmed on this exclusive boutique resort in the Indian Ocean, which sounds pretty sweet.”

“Wow.” I was impressed in spite of myself. “I thought Ari said they didn’t have much budget?”

“I don’t think they do. Baz let slip that the resort’s owned by an old school pal of his. It sounds like it’s kind of a new venture—I’m actually not sure it’s open to the public yet—and I got the distinct impression Baz is getting it for free… like, PR? You know, if people see the show they’re going to want to travel to the island, that kind of thing.”

“Are we going to turn up and find they’re still building it?”

“Baz’s assistant sent me some pictures of the island,” Nico said, not quite answering my question, but not quite evading it either. He turned off the kettle and opened his phone, passing it to me. While he put teabags in mugs and poured the water, I clicked on the WhatsApp link—to a site dubiously named “Effing Productions”—and a gallery opened up, the screen turning an almost unbelievable shade of blue that seemed so out of place in our dark little attic that I blinked.

“Wow! Sorry, that has to be a filter.”

“Right? Wait until you get to the coral.”

As I flicked through the pictures, even I had to admit it was not just a filter making this place look good. White sand. Palm trees. Water so clear you could see the fish swimming through it. A scattering of little straw-roofed huts… four or five? Maybe six. It was hard to tell, as they were mostly identical and were cleverly situated among the palms so that each looked completely private. Only one stood out—a villa like ones I’d seen in pictures of the Maldives, out over the shimmering water on wooden stilts. Hammocks swung from porches, and inside were white beds scattered with rose petals and immaculate pebble-tiled bathrooms with rainforest showerheads. It was a stark contrast from bleak, rainy east London.

“Holy fuck, Nico. It looks incredible.”

“Doesn’t it?” Nico was smirking. He knew he’d scored a hit with the pictures. “It’s elimination, so we have to commit to minimum two weeks, maximum ten, plus the winner has to agree to do PR on return to the UK. I don’t totally understand the format, but from what I could make out, each week there’s some kind of challenge, and I think the loser is out, and the winner can pick who they couple up with, so the couples shake up every week.”

If there had been a soundtrack to our conversation, this would have been followed by a record scratch.

“I’m sorry, what? You very much did not mention the recoupling part.”

“Didn’t I?” Nico looked a little uncomfortable, and more than a little guilty. Judging by his expression, Baz absolutely had mentioned it, and he’d deliberately failed to tell me. “I mean, it’s not a big deal. It’s just for the cameras.”

“Are you telling me this is Love Island, only the twist is wife swapping?”

“I mean, I don’t think anyone taking part is married, so technically—” Nico began, and then saw from my expression that this particular argument was not the one that was going to win me over, and hastily changed tack. “But the point is, it’s just to mix things up. You don’t actually have to shag the person you’re coupled up with. It just means you’re a couple within the show’s format. You could choose to stay coupled with the person you enter the show with, but obviously they’re not going to want everyone to do that. I imagine couples who stick together too closely are going to find themselves eliminated in the tasks.”

“You mean they’ll rig the outcome to get rid of faithful couples?” I knew my voice sounded shocked, and I could hear the primness, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself. Nico rolled his eyes.

“Lil, these things are always rigged. It’s not Jeopardy!—nobody’s watching this to see how good your general knowledge is. They want drama. They want big characters. They want screaming arguments and people shagging in the Jacuzzi for the cameras. Anyone boring is going to get the axe.”

“So is that what you’ll be doing after I’m gone? Shagging in the Jacuzzi?”

“What? No! Stop twisting my words. I didn’t say that. I said it has to look like that. I’m not going to be shagging anyone. But yeah, maybe I’ll shed a few tears after you’ve gone, talk about how you were my soulmate, cry on some girl’s shoulder while she strokes my hair. I’m a fantasy first boyfriend, remember? That’s what they’ll want from me.”

“And I’m girl-next-door fuckable,” I said with a touch of bitterness. “So what does that leave me doing? Fucking the guy in the next villa?”

“Over my dead body,” Nico said, and now he gripped me by the waist, kissing the side of my neck. “Seriously, Lil, this is an acting job. That’s why they’re contacting acting agents. You’re not an actor and they know it—they’ll be fine with you failing the first task, maybe the second—you’ll be on a plane home within a fortnight. And I’ll melt everyone’s hearts with how broken I am after you’ve gone, make a strategic friend-zone alliance with some heart-of-gold influencer, and lose with good grace in the final. And then I’ll come home as the abs that launched a thousand TikToks.”

“Ugh.” I pulled myself out of his grip and picked up the tea he’d left on the side, nursing it as I walked to the window, more to give myself time to think than because I really wanted it. “Nico, I don’t know. I really wish you’d explained all this before I spoke to Professor Bianchi.”

“Wait, you spoke to him?” Nico’s face lit up. I nodded, almost reluctantly.

“I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said I could have two weeks, if I wrote up the chikungunya results while I was there.”

“You’re kidding?” Nico’s face had split into a wide, exuberant grin, and now he advanced towards me, his arms held out, and an expression that made me hold out my brimming cup of hot tea.

“Do not even think about bear-hugging me again. I don’t want third-degree burns!”

“But you’ve got the time off? We’re really doing this?”

“Wife swapping?”

“Going on the trip of a lifetime, you idiot!” Nico said. I tried not to smile, but it was impossible not to—Nico’s excitement was so transparent and so infectious that I felt the corners of my mouth twitch in spite of myself.

“Lyla?”

“I don’t know. I need time to think.”

“Think about what? About an all-expenses-paid trip to paradise?” He fished his phone out of his back pocket and held it up in front of me; the tiny island, white and green, glowing like a pearl-crusted emerald in a sea of blue. “Are you really going to turn this down, Lil?”

I turned my head away from the screen, away from Nico’s pleading face, but it was a mistake—what faced me instead was the soot-streaked skylight lashed with rain.

Why was I holding out on this? What did I really have here other than a shitty job and a shitty commute and absolutely fuck all to look forward to? I couldn’t even hold up Christmas as a carrot to myself—it was January, and the gray London winter stretched out in front of me like a prison sentence—a prison sentence with the unemployment queue waiting at the far end.

Could this really solve everything? If it actually got made—and I was doubtful about that; Nico had been in enough “sure things” for me to know how shaky these promises were—then Nico was right, this really could transform his prospects. And if it didn’t… well, it would be two weeks in one of those adorable little huts.

“At least let Ari set up a meeting with Baz,” Nico begged, and I turned my gaze away from the skylight and looked at him, really looked, for the first time in what felt like a long time. I’d been expecting Nico’s trademark knee-weakening smile, but what I got was something far more devastating. He looked… worried. And I realized, maybe for the first time, that Nico’s eternal optimism wasn’t as effortless as it looked. That maybe he was facing the same crunch point that I was, the same realization that if the next roll of the dice didn’t come good, he might be out of the game. Maybe this was a last chance for both of us.

I felt myself giving way.

“Okay. I’ll talk to Baz.”

“Yes!” Nico punched the air. “I fucking love you, Lyla!”

“It’s just a meeting! They might not even want me.”

“Of course they’ll want you. How could anyone not want you? You’re a fucking scientific genius and you’re hot. What more could anyone want?”

A scientific genius wouldn’t have ended up in a research dead end with a publication record that had holes in it the size of the Grand Canyon, I thought a little wearily. But Nico was still speaking.

“… and you know what—I know you can only take two weeks off, but I don’t care. We’re the perfect couple, no matter who takes that prize.”

“We are,” I said. I put down the cup, stood on tiptoe, and kissed Nico on the lips, feeling his wide smile against my mouth, irrepressible even as he kissed me back.

“This is going to change everything.” He spoke the words close to my ear as he gathered me into him, squeezing me tight. “I can feel it in my bones.”

I could only hope he was right.