Chapter 31
Audrey
“No.” I click refresh. Nothing. Click again. Nothing. “No, no, no—”
Seventy-two hours until the FDA submission deadline, and I’m staring at a black screen.
“Audrey.” Logan’s voice comes from somewhere behind me, calm and measured. “What’s wrong?”
“The server.” I gesture helplessly at my monitor. “It’s down. I can’t access anything—the validation results, the documentation templates, the submission framework. It’s all just... gone.”
Logan rolls his chair over, his shoulder pressing against mine as he leans in to look. His fingers fly across my keyboard, trying different access points, different pathways. Each one returns the same error message: Connection failed. Server unavailable.
“It’s not just your workstation,” he says, pulling out his phone to check something. “The whole system is offline.”
“How is that possible? We have redundant power. We have backup generators. We have—”
“Hardware failure, maybe. Or a cascade issue in the cooling system.” He’s already standing, moving toward his own workstation to pull up the server diagnostics remotely. “I won’t know until I can see what’s happening on site.”
I push back from my desk and stand, because I can’t sit still. Can’t sit there staring at a dead screen while the deadline looms over us like a guillotine.
“Seventy-two hours,” I say. “We have seventy-two hours to compile the entire submission package, and we can’t access a single file.”
“I know.”
“Everything is on that server. The validation data. The clinical protocols. The security documentation. Three months of work, and we can’t—”
“Audrey.” Logan’s voice is still calm, but there’s an edge to it now. “I know.”
“Then why aren’t you panicking?”
“Because panicking doesn’t fix servers.” He looks up from his phone. “I need to go to the data center. Physically. Whatever’s wrong, I can’t diagnose it remotely.”
“Now? It’s two in the morning.”
“Servers don’t keep business hours.” He’s already grabbing his jacket. “I’ll text you when I know what’s wrong. You stay here and—”
“And what?” The words come out sharper than I intended. “Sit here staring at a blank screen? Twiddle my thumbs while our entire project is inaccessible?”
“Audrey—”
“This is my brainchild.” I’m pacing now, sneakers squeaking against the lab floor. “It’s so close to being born, and I can’t do a single thing to help because I don’t know how to fix a server—I only know how to use one. Right now I feel completely fucking useless.”
I hate how small my voice sounds. I hate the tears burning behind my eyes—not because the server is down, but because I need to be doing something, and there’s nothing I can do.
“This was supposed to be the easy part,” I whisper. “The validation worked. The simulation passed. We were supposed to just be compiling documents and double-checking formatting and—” My voice cracks. “We were so close, Logan.”
“We’re still close.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what’s wrong with the server. What if it’s catastrophic? What if we’ve lost everything?”
“We haven’t lost everything. The data exists. It’s on physical drives in a physical location. The server being down doesn’t mean the data is gone—it means we can’t access it right now.” He takes a step toward me. “And I’m going to fix that.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then we figure out our options. But I’m not going to stand here catastrophizing when I could be solving the problem.
” Another step. He’s close enough now that I can see the tension in his jaw, the way his hands are flexing at his sides like he’s fighting the urge to reach for me.
“What I need from you right now is to trust me.”
“I do trust you.”
“Then I need to go fix this.”
“I can’t just—” I press my palms against my eyes, trying to push back the tears that are threatening to spill over.
“I don’t know how to stand here and do nothing.
I don’t know how to let someone else handle it.
I’ve always been the one who fixes things.
My whole life, I’ve been the one who holds everything together, and right now I can’t hold anything because there’s nothing to hold, and I hate it. ”
“Audrey.” His voice is softer now. “Look at me.”
I drop my hands. He’s right in front of me, close enough to touch, his expression somewhere between worried and determined.
“You’re not useless,” he says. “And you’re not doing nothing. You’ve already done the hard part—the part that actually matters. You built something that’s going to change people’s lives. The server going down doesn’t erase that. It’s just a technical problem, and technical problems have solutions.”
“But—”
He kisses me.
Not a desperate kiss. Not a frantic attempt to shut me up.
Something slower. Deliberate. His hands come up to cup my face, thumbs brushing across my cheekbones, and he kisses me like we have all the time in the world.
Like there isn’t a deadline bearing down on us.
Like the only thing that matters right now is this—his mouth on mine, gentle and grounding and impossibly steady.
I resist at first. My body is still wound tight with panic, my mind still racing through worst-case scenarios.
But Logan doesn’t let go. He just keeps kissing me, soft and patient, until the tension in my shoulders starts to ease.
Until my hands, which had been clenched into fists at my sides, uncurl and find their way to his chest. Until the spiral slows, then stops, then dissolves into something quieter.
When he finally pulls back, his forehead rests against mine, and I’m reminded of the last time I spiraled in this same lab, after a different kind of crisis. Is this how you’re going to handle all our arguments? I’d asked. Making me come until I’m compliant?
Unfortunately, we don’t have time for him to order me onto the table so he can eat me out like last time. But he gives me a kiss so grounding I almost believe it will be enough to fix the world.
“You’re not in this alone,” he says. His voice is low, rough around the edges. “You never were. I’ve got you, Audrey. I’ll fix this. I promise.”
“OK.”
His thumbs are still moving against my cheeks, slow and soothing. “And I can promise that whatever happens with this deadline, whatever happens with the FDA, we figure it out together. That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.”
I close my eyes. The panic is still there, lurking at the edges, but it’s not drowning me anymore. Logan’s hands on my face are an anchor. His breath against my skin is a reminder that I’m not alone in this room, in this crisis, in this life.
“OK,” I whisper. “OK. Go fix the server.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m good now.” I open my eyes and manage a shaky smile. “Go be a tech genius. I’ll be here when you get back.”
He kisses my forehead—quick and firm—then pulls away, already shifting into problem-solving mode. I watch him grab his keys, check his phone, fire off a company-wide email about the situation.
At the door, he pauses and looks back at me.
“Try to get some rest,” he says. “I’ll text you updates.”
“I’m not going to rest.”
“I know. But try anyway.” The corner of his mouth quirks. “I love you.”
The words land soft and sure, just a fact of the universe—as constant as gravity, as reliable as code.
“I love you too,” I say. “Now go.”
He grins, a full-wattage smile, and then he’s gone.
I definitely don’t rest.
Instead, I make coffee. I pace. I check my phone approximately nine hundred times.
I try to do something useful—print out the paper copies of our documentation checklists that are local on my drive, review the submission requirements for the thousandth time—but my brain won’t focus on anything except the silence from Logan.
At 3:17 a.m., a text: Found the problem. Power supply failure in the primary cooling unit. Replacing now.
At 4:02 a.m.: Cooling back online. Running system diagnostics.
At 4:48 a.m.: Diagnostics clear. Bringing servers back up. Should have access in 20.
At 5:14 a.m., my monitor flickers. The connection icon spins. And then—
Files. Folders. Everything exactly where we left it.
I slump in my chair, relief flooding through me so fast it makes me dizzy.
When Logan walks back into the lab thirty minutes later, he looks like he’s been wrestling with industrial equipment.
His hair is wild, there’s a smear of something dark on his jaw, and his sleeves are rolled up past his elbows.
He’s carrying two cups of coffee from the place down the street that opens at five for the early commuters.
“Server’s back,” he says, handing me a cup. “All systems nominal. We’re good to go.”
I take the coffee and just stare at him for a moment. This man who spent four hours alone in a server room in the middle of the night because I needed him to. Who diagnosed a cooling failure and replaced a power supply and brought an entire system back online while I sat here feeling helpless.
“My hero,” I say. “You did it.”
“It’s what I do.” He drops into the chair beside me, exhaustion finally showing in the slump of his shoulders. “Although I’ll admit, the power supply was more corroded than I expected. Bennett’s going to need to have a conversation with his facilities team about preventive maintenance.”
“Logan.”
“Hmm?”
I set down the coffee, stand, and pull him up out of his chair just so I can wrap my arms around him properly. He makes a surprised sound but recovers quickly, his arms coming around me, his face burying in my hair.
“Thank you,” I say against his chest. “For fixing it. For not letting me spiral. For—” I pull back enough to look at him. “For being my person.”
“You’d do the same for me. You’re my forever human, you know.”
I want to laugh, because it’s the dorkiest thing anyone’s ever said to me, but it lands so hard it makes my throat tight.
“I like that,” I whisper, reaching up to wipe the smear off his jaw with my thumb. “I like the idea of forever with you.”
“Good. Because you’re stuck with me now. I’m not going anywhere.” A smile ghosts over his lips.
We just stand there grinning at each other like idiots for a few seconds, both too battered by the night to bother with pretense. I tip my forehead to his, our noses almost touching. “You know? You look like you’ve been in a fistfight with a server rack.”
“The server rack started it.”
I laugh, and something in my chest loosens. We’re OK. The server’s OK. The submission is going to happen.
We’re going to be OK.
“All right,” I say, stepping back and squaring my shoulders and checking my watch. “We’ve got sixty-seven hours and a submission package to compile. You ready?”
Logan picks up his coffee and takes a long sip, then sets it down with a decisive clunk.
“Let’s do this.”