Adam stared at her wide-eyed, his coffee cup midway toward his mouth. "You're joking right?"
When Sarah came back to the lab, Adam had greeted her with a wide grin, which had soon morphed into a frown when he saw her expression. Which then had remained wide open with shock when she told him about Elias' visit and Eva's phone-call.
"wish I was..." she said tapping the counter with her fingernails. Adam seemed to think it through before he opened his mouth and said in a rare serious tone. "I certainly didn't see that one coming... do you think he..."
"I don't know Adam, I don't know what to think..."
"So Elias wasn't here to declare his undying love for you after all..." he said in a teasing tone, which only made Sarah's heart ping more painfully.
"Elias burned every single bridge between us when he decided to play informant for his department..." she said in a quiet tone that seemed to resonate against the sterile walls of the lab.
"You know it isn't true, you were the one who cut all ties with him. And he may not have done anything since I told you I forgot the same document in the cafeteria the other day"
"For twenty freaking minutes, and you found it exactly where you left it" She hissed at Adam's retort. Maybe he wasn't the one who did it, but she couldn't risk the possibility of her 'maybe' to come out wrong, no matter how much she wanted to... there was too much at stake already.
Adam didn't comment, he took the time to take a few gulps from his cup eying the transparent vials filled with extracts and chemicals.
what an innocent looking color she thought one would think that poisons would look somewhat diffrent than the water that we drink every day.
"do you think we should destroy it?" he said suddenly.
They should, and she almost responded that way. if only destroying it would erase everything along with it. She wished it could, now she was wondering if it was a good idea to tell P.Wattani about their experiment. She never told him Adam was involved, which seems to be a good thing now, even if there was an unexpected outcome, she knew Adam will make sure their secret will remain safe, like P.Wattani said, some things are better left unknown.
When they first welcomed The Queen, they never envisaged that their search would lead to such discoveries, at first they were just trying to see what it would give them to tincture some parts of it, with such an exotic scent, they wondered what the flower's perfume would be like, but along the way in their process they noticed something, every morning when Sarah and Adam came into the lab they started with smelling the perfume, the action started to grow into twice a day, so they decided to stop it and see what would come out. They spent the following few days with terrible headaches and bad moods, coffee didn't help, they were barely functional, and Elias had to drive them both to and from work for four days until they decided to take the rest of the week off telling everyone they caught a stomac bug. Maybe that's when Elias started having his doubts.
After several tests, they came to the conclusion that the Plant's essence was addictive. Thankfully, they were able to overcome their addiction because they realized it in time. But the shock of their discovery lasted, if a weak distillation of the Essence could have that effect on them, then what would a strong real one have? That was a question the professor refused to look into. he was so nervous about the discovery when she told him, that she didn't have it in her at that time to mention Adam's involvement. Nor did she reveal to him that they already started working to sorlve that question.
"Do you know where the professor keeps the essence?" Adam suddenly asked. "What if they have it?"
"I doubt it, I think he keeps it here in the vault. I have the combination. the formula is there too."
Sarah looked at her phone, it was fifteen minutes past P.Wattani's lecture. She didn't tell Eva to wait for his lecture because she doubted he would show up, Even then she knew he wouldn't come, but admitting it would have been admitting that something was wrong with their usually monotonous schedule. P.Wattani has always been a perfectionist, and they quickly learned to go with it, even though the man seemed civil, he tended to become authoritative when things weren't going his way, sometimes even manipulative. Elias had pointed it out in one of their last conversations but she dismissed it and thought of it as an effort from him to make P.Wattani seem bad. Yet now she realized she was wrong, P.Wattani was manipulative and sometimes treated them as if they were his possession, it was one of the few things that rose arguments in their team.
The other thing was Elias. When they started dating P.Wattani was extremely disapproving to the point of harassing her about it, but at the time she was so caught up on balancing the first real relationship she had and a job she loved that she didn't notice his behavior. it was just an obstacle she faced stubbornly until it finally ceased, to prove to herself that she was able to do it alone. There were heated arguments not only between the two of them, Adam often got fed up with it and eventually stood up to him too, seeing Elias and her were becoming serious. but something made him back down at the time, she still didn't know what, it just suddenly stopped.
But when the information was leaked, P.Wattani seemed to have a field day in criticising Elias and managed to make her believe that he did more than leak the information and that it was his intention from the start, he had said that in their line of work they needed to choose their priorities and that commitment to two things never worked out, she knew at the time that he was refering to his dissolving marriage, and in her betrayed and broken state she half believed him and started getting fearful of the next time Elias would leak something to his boss.
Their relationship was dissolving along with her trust, and she found that her devastation was too great to support watching it get uglier and uglier until there was no trace of the love and friendship they bonded over. She knew that all relationships started with those happy content moments full of passion and spark and that the ones that lasted kept most of that long after the novelty of their relationship wore out. So A few weeks later, Sarah found herself handing him the ring and calmly walking out with a silent broken heart, holding to whatever decency was left between them. She was at a point where she had to sacrifice one of them, and regarding the position P.Wattani has put her in, and how she and Elias were becoming, it was Elias she had to lose. because there was no way she could leave the lab at such a critical moment.
"we should call her," she said absentmindedly.
"Yeah, are you going to tell her the truth?"
"I don't have a choice, I don't feel like taking the lead on this, we have more important things to do. but someone has to inform the authorities."
Adam sighed his breath as heavy as her heart felt at the moment. The man who usually was so full of life spark and laughter was now grim and stiff, his carefree attitude gone as he seemed to calculate each movement and word that came from him.
"how about you tell Eva, and I inform the institute's board. Then we can both inform Austin and plan things based on what he would say.?"
As usual, Adam managed to make a practical plan using levelheaded thinking in this tight situation. Sarah nodded knowing that her colleague was probably visualizing how their day was going to change, and what would be the reaction of every person involved in this. it was going to be an endless day...