Chapter 18 Tom
Chapter eighteen
Tom
SOS
The screen of my phone is lit up with a single text from Sam.
I call. She answers on the first half-ring.
"What's wrong?"
"My laptop crashed." Her voice is brittle, dangerously tight, the sound of someone actively fighting off a panic attack. "The presentation files are corrupted. The hard drive won't spin. I have three days to rebuild everything from scratch."
"I'm coming over." I'm already standing, scanning the room for my keys, shoving my feet into my boots.
"Tom, you don't have to—"
"I'm already grabbing my stuff. Send me your apartment number."
I hang up before she can argue. My jacket is on the chair, wallet in my pocket, keys next to the monitor. I yank the portable hard drive cable out of my tower and drop the metal square into my camera bag. The subway is four blocks west, and the 1 train runs straight down to her neighborhood.
I'm out the door in under a minute.
The train is packed with commuters heading uptown, a claustrophobic crush of damp coats and evening exhaustion. I wedge myself into a corner near the sliding doors and pull out my phone.
Twenty minutes, I text her.
She doesn't reply.
By the time I hit street level, I'm practically jogging. Sam's building is the third one from the corner, a pre-war red brick with a green awning that's seen better years. I buzz her apartment number and the intercom crackles with static.
"It's me," I say.
The heavy door clicks unlocked and I push through.
Her door is at the end of the hall. It opens before I knock.
Sam stands in the doorway, still in her work clothes but barefoot. Her hair is pulled back and there's a crease between her eyebrows that wasn't there this morning.
"Hey," she says.
"Show me."
She steps aside and I follow her into the main room.
The apartment is clean. Books arranged by height, kitchen counter empty except for a coffee maker.
The desk is against the far wall under a window looking out at brick.
It’s covered in printouts, sticky notes, and a yellow legal pad filled with handwritten bullet points.
The main screen is blue. Error code in white text.
I set my bag down and move to stand behind her chair.
She gestures at the desk. "The hard drive failed. I called IT. They said the backup synced this morning, but when I tried to restore the files half of them came through corrupted. The presentation deck is gone. The technical appendix is gone. The rendering package is mostly gone."
"Can IT do anything? "
"Forty-eight hour turnaround for recovery. Maybe longer if the drive is physically damaged." Her hand rests on the edge of the desk, fingers tapping against the wood.
"I can't wait that long. The Board meeting is Thursday."
I crouch down next to her chair so I'm at eye level with her instead of looming. "Let me see it."
She slides the laptop toward me. I angle the screen and read the error code. It's the same one I've seen twice before on my own equipment. The files aren't corrupted. They're just locked behind a drive that stopped spinning.
"I know a guy," I say. "He does data recovery for photographers. Rush jobs. He can have this back to you by Wednesday morning."
Her eyes cut to me. "It's a company laptop. Confidential client data. Tom, if Richard finds out an unauthorized vendor touched this drive, I'm fired. It's a massive NDA violation."
"Mags recovers hard drives for paranoid fashion photographers and indie film directors. He doesn't look at the files, and he doesn't talk."
She rubs her forehead, staring at the blue screen. I can practically see the protocol-obsessed project manager fighting a war with the woman who just watched her entire presentation vanish.
"Do you want the files back or not?" I ask quietly.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her fingers go still against the desk.
"Yeah. I do."
"Then trust me."
She looks at me. I don't look away.
“Sam, I don't make promises I can't keep.”
She lifts her hand off the desk, officially surrendering control.
I close the laptop, unplug the power cable, and tuck it under my arm. The laptop is heavy. Company property. If Mags can't fix this, I just walked out with her career in my hands and no backup plan.
"I'll text you when I drop it off," I say.
She nods.
I turn to the door.
"Tom."
I stop.
"Thank you."
I just nod and leave.
The subway to Williamsburg takes thirty minutes and I spend the entire ride with the laptop pressed against my leg inside my bag. Mags owes me a favor from last year.
"Seized spindle," Mags says, popping the back panel with a practiced twist of his screwdriver. "Recoverable. But it takes time. And time costs."
"How much for Wednesday morning?"
"For a rush? Eight hundred."
Eight hundred dollars. The money I'd set aside for the low-light lens I'd been eyeing for months.
"You sure?" Mags is watching me.
"I'm sure." I slide my card across the counter.
I step back out onto the street. The laptop won't be ready until Wednesday, which means Sam has nothing right now.
I pull out my phone.
Drive is in good hands. Heading back to you now. We can rebuild this.
Her reply comes through fast.
Okay
There's a Thai place three blocks south. The smell hits me halfway down the block—lemongrass and chili oil. I stop. Order Pad Thai, spring rolls, and Thai iced tea.
It's past nine when I buzz up to Sam's again.
Her door opens before I knock.
"I brought food."
She steps aside. The desk is transformed—printouts stacked, legal pad open to a fresh timeline. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday sketched across the top.
"Stop," I say, setting the food down.
She looks up. "I can't stop. I know your guy is working on the drive, but if he can't save it, I only have three days—"
"You're right. We aren't risking Thursday on a 'maybe'." I pull my portable hard drive out of my bag and set it next to her legal pad. "I have the photos. You have the notes. We build a safety-net version tonight, just in case."
She stares at me. "You're going to stay and help me rebuild the entire deck?"
"That's what partners do."
She doesn't move. Then she reaches for the legal pad, flips to a clean page, and clicks her pen.
"Okay. Walk me through what you have."
We work side by side for three hours. I pull up the shared folder; she rebuilds the layouts. Click. Export. Drag. Type. She writes a caption; I resize the image.
The rhythm settles. By midnight, we've rebuilt sixty percent.
"Break," Sam says, rolling her shoulders.
I check the clock. "Good idea."
She moves to the couch. I follow with the bag of Thai food and set it on the coffee table. She opens the container of Pad Thai. Her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch, the first real physical release of tension I've seen from her all night.
"You are a lifesaver," she murmurs, handing me a pair of chopsticks.
"Why are you so good at this?" Sam asks softly, staring at her food.
"At what?"
"Solving problems on the fly. Handling things when they fall apart."
I wipe my hands on a napkin. "Practice. When you move around a lot, you learn to adapt. Fix things before anyone notices they're broken."
She watches me, fork halfway to her mouth. "I've spent my whole life trying to control outcomes. Make sure nothing falls apart." She pauses, her voice incredibly quiet. "But you're good at handling things when they do."
"We balance each other out."
She sets her fork down and turns to face me fully. "You don't have to fix everything alone anymore. You know that, right?"
I just spent eight hundred dollars without telling her, because that’s exactly what I do. I fix things alone.
But she isn’t just talking about the laptop or the project. She means I don't have to be alone.
And I like that thought.
"Yeah," I say. "I'm starting to."
We sit like that for a while, eating cold Thai food on her couch at one in the morning. The deadline is still there. We keep working.
Eventually I stand, clear the containers, and move back to the desk. "Let's finish this."
She follows.
***
Wednesday morning I'm at Mags' shop at eight. The laptop is waiting, sticky note on top: ALL RECOVERED.
I text Sam a photo of the folder structure. Every file is there.
Her reply is immediate.
You saved me.
I stare at the screen. I think about the eight hundred dollars, the missed sleep, the sheer panic in her voice when she called me.
Just returning the favor.
I tuck the laptop into my bag, and head back to the train. I find a seat near the window and Brooklyn slides past as we go underground.
She trusted me with her career. She let me catch her when she fell.
And for the first time in my life, I didn't run.