"There was a student," she began, her gaze drifting toward the window, looking past the street traffic toward something only she could see. "About four years ago."
"It was near the end of my postgraduate work in Berlin..."
"A student in my research group had falsified data in a paper that was on the verge of being published."
"It wasn't massive, systemic fraud, but it was real... It was the kind of lie that would have ended his career and likely the careers of two other people in the group who had done nothing wrong but whose names were tied to the paper."
"You were the one who caught it," Mike said. It wasn't a question.
"I caught it because it was my job to check the data for the final draft," she said, her voice tightening slightly. "And suddenly, the academic world became very small."
"I had a choice... I could report it—the 'correct' procedural move, which would have destroyed three careers, two of which were innocent."
