🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.8/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read The Love Hypothesis yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
A third year PhD student needs to convince her best friend that she has completely moved on from her ex. Her solution? Kiss the first man she sees. That man turns out to be Adam Carlsen, the most intimidating professor in the biology department, notorious for being cold, demanding, and not particularly interested in anyone’s feelings. This is how a fake relationship starts. This is also, obviously, not where it ends.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Prologue
Before any of this happens, Olive had a moment she doesn’t even know about. During her initial Stanford interview she was wearing expired contacts and could barely see. She ended up in a conversation with someone in a bathroom who gave her genuinely encouraging advice that helped convince her to pursue her PhD. She had no idea who he was. He knew exactly who she was. That detail becomes important later.
The Kiss
Olive’s best friend Anh has feelings for Jeremy, an ex Olive casually dated once or twice. Olive genuinely doesn’t care, she wants Anh to go for it. But Anh refuses to make a move unless she has definitive proof that Olive has moved on. Olive finds this frustrating because she has told Anh repeatedly that she is completely fine with it and Anh just won’t believe her. So she panics, grabs the nearest man in a Stanford hallway when Anh is walking by, and kisses him so Anh will see.
That man is Adam Carlsen.
Instead of getting her expelled, Adam goes along with it. When the rumor spreads faster than either of them expected, Olive runs to him in a panic trying to figure out how to undo it. Adam suggests they just let people keep thinking they’re dating. She needs to know what he gets out of it. He tells her the university has frozen his research funding because they think he’s a flight risk planning to leave for another institution in Boston. A high-profile relationship with a Stanford PhD candidate would prove he has roots on campus and likely get his funding released. It seems practical for both of them. They make a deal.
Adam
Adam has a reputation around campus that is not particularly warm. He is tough, demanding, makes graduate students cry during research presentations, and the rumors have a way of feeding on themselves. One of Olive’s friends Malcolm is so hostile to the arrangement he can barely stand to hear Adam’s name said out loud. Her friend Greg shows up furious because Adam failed his thesis proposal and goes off on Olive as if she has any say in Adam’s academic decisions whatsoever. She is starting to feel the pressure of being his fake girlfriend even though she has nothing to do with how he runs his lab.
And yet. The more time she actually spends with him, the more the reputation and the reality don’t match up. He starts taking her feedback to heart when she points out that his delivery is making grad students want to quit. He buys her cookies from their very first coffee date because he makes significantly more money than she does and she doesn’t make much at all. He is quietly, consistently paying attention to her in a way nobody else does.
Tom
Olive has been trying to get into Tom Benton’s lab in Boston. Her pancreatic cancer research is deeply personal — her mother died of it — and Tom’s lab is a strong fit. They have been emailing back and forth. One day while she and Adam are out for coffee, Tom walks up to the table. Turns out he and Adam are old friends. The dynamic is immediately odd. They have been fake dating for maybe two weeks at this point and Tom is asking why Adam didn’t know she was applying to his lab. It feels like a strange thing to expect from people who have been together such a short time.
Tom listens to her research pitch and then starts pushing on why pancreatic cancer specifically. She tries to keep it professional but he keeps pressing until she admits her mom had it. He just keeps going, asking if she died, forcing her deeper into something painful and personal. Adam steps in and tells him to stop harassing his girlfriend.
Tom tells her she has two weeks to write up everything — her protocols, her processes, everything she has done. At the time she is excited. In hindsight this is the first sign something is very wrong. Why does he need absolutely everything she has done?
The Coffee Dates and Growing Closer
The weekly coffee dates are where everything quietly shifts. Anh keeps engineering situations that push Olive closer to Adam — a lecture with no seating that ends with Olive sunk into Adam’s lap, someone’s dead car battery that Adam pushes down the road until Anh tells Olive she better go kiss the man who just saved the day. It almost seems like Anh knows they are not actually a couple and is rooting for them anyway.
Olive is slowly putting two and two together that Adam might be the man from the bathroom at the beginning of the book. Her friend Anh makes her realize she is head over heels for him, which absolutely freaks her out. She is going off about how she would even tell Adam when she realizes he is standing right behind her in the coffee shop. She lies and tells him she was talking about someone else. Adam plays it off but he seems hurt.
Holden Rodriguez is Adam’s oldest friend and one of the most genuinely good people in this book. Adam and Tom both seem to think Holden is jealous of their friendship but Holden has a very good reason for not trusting Tom that comes out more and more as the book goes on. Holden tells Olive that Adam has wanted to ask out this amazing girl in his department for years, probably since the first time they met. He doesn’t say Olive’s name directly but of course it’s her. She spirals immediately, convinced Adam has feelings for someone else and that she is messing things up for him.
Holden also warns her to watch her back around Tom. And to watch Adam’s back.
Getting Closer
Olive’s friends assume she is staying with Adam at an academic conference and don’t book her accommodation. She ends up having to stay in his room because there is nowhere else, which is a wildly large assumption for people who have been dating two weeks but here they are. They are growing closer, being genuinely vulnerable with each other, and neither of them can quite see that the other person has completely real feelings at this point.
Adam opens up about his own mentor, who made feedback personal rather than keeping it about the work, who pitted PhD students against each other for sport, who never gave credit where it was due. Olive realizes as he is talking that she called him brutal earlier in their arrangement and that is exactly the word she would use to describe what he just described. She can see how much that would have stung coming from her. He is not a bad person. He is someone who watched bad mentorship up close and has spent his entire career trying to do the opposite of it.
They are both being vulnerable in a way neither of them is used to. And then he says it — I wish you could see yourself the way that I do. It is a small line and it does a lot of work.
The Conference
Olive gives her talk at the conference. Tom is on the same panel. She feels like she did well and stays behind to collect her things including her phone, which she had been recording with. It is just her and Tom left in the room.
He starts hitting on her. She is absolutely shocked. He tells her they both know she slept with Adam to get ahead and they both know she’ll sleep with him too. He says the only reason he accepted her into his program was because she was dating Adam Carlsen. She thinks immediately of Holden’s warning.
She tells him she will tell Adam. Tom says — quick question, who do you think Adam will believe, some girl he has been sleeping with or someone who has had his back for years?
She asks why he is doing this. His answer is simply because he can. He tells her Adam always has to be the best at everything and he likes the idea of taking something away from him for once. He goes on to tell her she is a mediocre scientist who stutters, doing everything he can to beat her down, and then offers her a deal — keep him happy next year and he will keep her happy.
She tells him she will take her research elsewhere. His response is that that’s not going to work because he has everything she gave him — all her steps, her processes, everything. He can just duplicate her work. She says that’s academic misconduct but he tells her he is who he is and she is nothing.
She runs back to the room sobbing and Adam tries to figure out what happened. She won’t tell him the full truth. She eventually gives him an altered version of events that leaves out Tom and the harassment entirely.
What she doesn’t realize yet is that her phone had been recording the whole time. She had accidentally captured everything Tom said.
When Adam is trying to comfort her they have an intimate moment and end up sleeping together. Adam is convinced this is the start of something new. Olive wants it to be so badly, but she decides she is holding Adam back from Boston since she won’t be going, so she tells him it’s September 29th and as per their agreement today is the day their deal is done. Adam is softly devastated. So is Olive.
The Resolution
Olive’s mentor asks for a copy of her recording of her talk so she goes to send it and realizes it’s several hours long. She forgot to stop recording. She is in the middle of editing it to send when a section starts playing — it’s Tom. She had accidentally recorded everything Tom said and she has proof. Anh and Malcolm are in the room and they hear the terrible things Tom had said to her so she is forced to explain. Her friends convince her that Adam would want to know even if they aren’t together, but she is still on the fence, so she goes to Holden for advice. He tells her Adam can’t make a decision if he doesn’t have all the information — and that many schools had tried to recruit him, but he had never even interviewed for one until Olive was going to move to Boston, and that’s where he had agreed to interview. So she chases Adam down.
She shares the recording. Tom is exposed completely. Her career is saved.
When Adam finds out what Tom did he cuts ties with his former friend entirely. No hesitation. He doesn’t question it for a second. He is fully ready to believe Tom said this and essentially ready to destroy him for hurting Olive like that.
The Reveal
Adam confesses his feelings were never fake. And when they get back to California from the conference, at a double date with Malcolm and Holden — because they are now dating — it comes out that Adam was the stranger in the bathroom during her initial Stanford interview. He has been pining for her ever since. He was the one who gave her the advice that convinced her to pursue her PhD in the first place. He has known who she was and cared about what happened to her from the very beginning. That is what the prologue was setting up all along and it is genuinely lovely when it finally clicks into place.
Holden had been right the whole time. Of course it was her.
Olive confesses her love in return. The fake arrangement becomes something real.
Best Part of This Book
Watching them slowly build something real out of what was supposed to be a transaction. The coffee dates, the cookies, the way Adam takes her feedback to heart. The way he is soft for her and no one else — it just reminds me of the best part of my marriage. And that prologue payoff — finding out he was the stranger who encouraged her years ago and has remembered her ever since — is the kind of detail that makes you want to immediately go back and reread the whole thing from the beginning.
Worst Part of This Book
Just Tom. The whole Tom situation. The lab offer that turned out to be a setup. The harassment at the conference. The threat to steal her research. He is one of the most genuinely unpleasant characters I have read and not in a way that feels like good storytelling — just in the way that some people are genuinely awful and it is upsetting to watch.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥 — Present but not the focus. This is a slow burn emotional romance first and the heat follows from that rather than completely driving it. The conference hotel room is the peak of it.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Completely satisfied. Two people who are both terrible at saying things out loud finally saying them, and a reveal that reframes their entire connection from the very first pages of the book. And the Malcolm and Holden relationship. I also identify as a fellow nerd so this just feeds my soul so much more than the fantasy billionaire tropes that can be so overdone.
Would I Reread It?
Yes, this is my second time, and I may listen again in a couple of years.
Who Is This For
Ali Hazelwood fans obviously, but also anyone who loves a fake dating premise that earns its real feelings, a hero who shows up consistently through action rather than words, and a heroine whose work actually matters to the story rather than just being decoration around the romance. Also fellow nerds who find STEM settings genuinely refreshing after the fifteenth billionaire romance in a row.
Where to Get
📖 Physical Book
Amazon | Bookshop.org
📱 Ebook
Amazon | Bookshop.org
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