Mr. CEO Your Wife Has Wanted a Divorce for a Long Time novel Chapter 684

Chapter 684

Seeing how well Julia had held her own tonight, and how openly Dr. Mercer and the others had responded to Logan and Janice exchanged a glance. The odds were looking good.

Still, Franklin knew better than to bring it up in the middle of a crowded room. That kind of ask deserved the moment. He waited until the group had started to break apart, and then, as the three of them made their way together through a quieter part of the building, he brought it up.

Dr. Mercer listened, then smiled. “Ms. Brown’s credentials speak for themselves, and being one of Smith’s stude carries real weight. If she wants to come learn with my team, that’s not a problem at all.”

But he didn’t stop there. His tone shifted slightly, taking on the careful, deliberate quality of someone who was an actual assessment. He started asking Julia questions, specific ones: what her doctoral research had focused o when she’d graduated, what she’d been working on in the two years since.

These weren’t small talk questions anymore. This was him taking her seriously.

Julia answered carefully. She walked him through the focus of her dissertation. Then, when he asked about the y

since graduation, she said, “The past two years, I’ve mostly been working alongside the team on multimodal fusic

research.”

Dr. Mercer nodded slowly. “In autonomous driving, multimodal fusion is one of those problems that keeps resisti

clean solutions. It’s probably the direction most worth pushing on right now.”

Then he asked her to walk him through the progress her team had actually made.

Wilson Tech had moved the needle in a few areas over the past couple of years, and Julia laid that out for him. But when she got to the end of it, something made her add one more thing. Maybe it was the fact that Franklin was standing right there. Maybe it was just who she was. “To be honest, those results aren’t really mine to claim. I’ve bee following the team’s lead, learning as I go. If you’re asking what I’ve done on my own, independently, the answer is… not much. Nothing with any real substance behind it.”

It was a brutally honest thing to say. She’d handed him the less flattering version of the picture without being asked.

Dr. Mercer went quiet for a moment. He looked down at the glass in his hand, held the silence for a beat, then turned and gave Franklin a look. It was brief and unreadable, but it was there. Then he looked back at Julia and said, evenly. “Nearly two years out and still no independent breakthroughs. That’s…” He paused. “That’s not quite where you’d wan

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