After our game, Heath decided to call it a night. I watched Emilia, trying to determine if she was still irritated with me. It was deserved, I guess. The one time she’d tried to bring up the med school discussion since getting the news yesterday, I’d put her off. I hadn’t been ready then. I hadn’t devised my line of attack. I’d needed to prepare.

I opened a bottle of beer for each of us and took a long drink while she picked up her cards and tidied up at the table from our game, studiously avoiding my scrutiny. I watched every move she made, every expression that crossed her face.

So she wanted to talk about this? I was ready now. I had strategized, because games were all about strategy and I had learned, seemingly, at the knees of a master. Sun Tzu’s words from The Art of War now whispered to me across a thousand years.

Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

We wouldn’t fight. I’d start this out casually, nonthreateningly. And then I’d show her reason. Emilia was a rational woman, almost too rational, sometimes. She lived in fear of letting her emotions rule her. That fear had almost prevented us from beginning our relationship in the first place. So I’d treat this like two war leaders sitting at the table for a calm negotiation, a division of spoils.

Damn if I hadn’t even mentally sketched a flowchart for this as well. “That’s not a bad deck,” I started, nodding to her cards. “You could have beaten Heath if you’d gotten the right cards out in time.”

She raised a brow at me. “But not you, of course. You know, if you win every single game, no one’s going to want to play with you anymore.”

I took another sip of beer and watched as she slipped her deck of cards into a box and scooped up some dice, tucking them inside a leather pouch. It was Sunday night, the end of the weekend and I wasn’t looking forward to getting up and going in to work tomorrow. There was something sobering in that realization. I couldn’t remember ever dreading Monday morning before. I used to thrive on Monday mornings, excited to start a new workweek even as the old one had barely ended.

Emilia went to stand up from the table when I waved to her untouched bottle of beer and she shrugged, saying she wasn’t thirsty. I reached out and pressed my hand on top of hers, preventing her from getting up to leave. “You want to talk now?”

She froze for a split second, then let out a long breath and leaned back, grabbing the beer and taking a long pull from the bottle. Suddenly she was thirsty—and very visibly nervous. I felt a slight rise in my blood pressure at this realization. What would she have to be nervous about unless she’d made a decision she knew I wouldn’t like?

I swallowed, tried to remember scraps of ancient Chinese military wisdom to help me through this. There would be no emotions. It would be a calm, rational negotiation. One that I would win, of course. One way or the other.

I smiled, hiding my own sudden nervousness. “Thanks for being patient with me,” I began. “I just had to think things through for a little bit.”

She nodded, watching me warily with her eyes the color of autumn leaves. What was that color, anyway? If I were a chick, I’d be able to name it. They were lovely, golden with darker flecks around the pupils. I waited for her to speak first.

“I can’t stop thinking about going to Hopkins,” she said quietly, a slight tremor in her voice. Good. She’d started out sounding unsure. Something I might be able to exploit. She was unsure about going despite what she said.

I rubbed my jaw, hesitating. “So as I understand it, you’ve chosen this school because of its oncology program.”

Emilia looked at me and then quickly away. “They’re doing some fascinating work with stem cells.”

“They’re not the only ones. And no state has more supportive laws concerning stem cell research than California.” I was about to add some facts about Proposition 71 that I had found in my research, but cut myself off, judging that it might be over the top. I didn’t want her getting defensive.

“Umm. Okay. That’s true, but Hopkins has its own stem cell research fund from the state. And their research in epigenetics is foremost in the world.”

I’d run across that word during my own research—remembered it eidetically, as I remembered everything I’d ever read. Epigenetics was the study of change in inheritance not caused by DNA. It was directly related to how some cells become cancerous over time. And she was right, Hopkins had the top physician studying in the field. But I wasn’t completely unarmed to battle that fact.