Dumped My Cheating Ex. Now I'm Sleeping Next to a Billionaire CEO novel Chapter 1094

November in Boston meant the wind was sharp enough to cut right through you. Inside the lab, though, the air felt even heavier. John stared at the last financial report, frustration making him rake his fingers through his tangled blond hair. The money was gone. The nightmare that haunted every researcher had finally caught up with them. Harvard’s funding had dried up last week. Since then, everyone had been scraping by, paying out of their own pockets just to keep the project alive.

But PhD students were just regular people. Nobody had a secret fortune waiting at home. The core model still running on the lab bench felt like a bottomless pit, swallowing cash faster than they could count it.

One of the PhD candidates, a woman close to thirty, had tears shining in her eyes. “John, if we don’t get results by Christmas, we’ll miss this year’s awards. I can’t stand the thought of waiting another whole year…” Her voice was shaky, and in her desperation, she glanced at the break room where Emmy was quietly reading.

“Should we… ask Emmy?”

“No.” John shut the idea down instantly. He frowned, lowering his voice so Emmy wouldn’t overhear anything that might hurt her feelings. “The next phase of experiments is just going to eat money. Every full run costs tens of thousands, and for reliable data, we need to do it at least a few dozen more times. We’re looking at a gap of over a million dollars. We can’t ask her to cover that.”

He glanced over at Emmy, sitting quietly in a plain beige sweater, lost in her journal articles. To John, she was a brilliant talent from the East, but she lived so simply. In all these months, he’d never seen her buy anything nice for herself. She always ate in the cafeteria, never splurged on anything, and hadn’t taken a single dollar of the consultant’s pay she’d earned these past months.

“She’s already helped us so much,” John said. “And honestly, she’s so careful with money. I doubt her family’s well-off. She’s here alone, in a foreign country, working twice as hard as anyone just to keep up. She’s under enough pressure. We can’t pile this on her too.”

The group fell silent, exchanging helpless glances before dropping their heads in defeat.

In the break room, Emmy’s fingers paused on the page. She didn’t look up, but she could feel how tense the lab was. Fewer and fewer people had been coming in lately.

That day, noticing the lab was almost empty, Emmy went to find Harlene.

“Harlene, where is everyone?”

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