Altitude Is My Only Alibi

The night before my dossier for a senior research fellowship was due, my boyfriend secretly submitted my name for a two-year deployment to the Cerro Chajnantor outpost—a brutal, isolated observatory seventeen thousand feet up in the Andes.

When I confronted him, asking why he would do such a thing, he barely looked up from his phone.

"Mia was using my laptop yesterday," he said casually. "She must have clicked it by accident. It was just a harmless little joke."

"A joke? There’s a twenty-four-hour secondary confirmation. All you had to do was click 'Decline'."

Mia. Mia Warren.