The Deadline Deal: Wanting the Story, Needing the Man

Dinah here, 35 years old, twelve years at this paper and lately feeling every one of them. The newsroom at 1 a.m. is just me and the servers humming over by the east wall, monitors glowing blue, my cold coffee gone the color of pond water, and the cleaning crew's floor polish smell still hanging in the air like it thinks it owns the place. My story is due to my editor in thirty-six hours and I've got a data set half cracked and half garbage, and I've been staring at the same pivot table so long the numbers look like they're rearranging themselves out of spite.

So that's when Tom Danforth walks in, 37 years old, my ex-husband, carrying a grease-spotted bag of takeout and a USB drive in his other hand like he's delivering pizza and a subpoena at the same time.

"How'd you even get up here," I say, not looking up, because if I look up I have to deal with his face.

"Mitch owed me a favor, I called him. He buzzed me through." He sets the bag on the edge of my desk, right on top of my printouts, which is very him. "You look terrible."

"Thanks, I'd been going for that."

"I mean it kindly. You've been doing the thing where you don't eat and you hunch." He pulls the chair from the next desk over, the one that squeaks, and sits down before I've invited him to, which is also very him. "I heard through the grapevine you're stuck on the port authority contracts story."

"The grapevine being your sister."

"The grapevine being my sister, yes. So I brought pad thai and, this," and he holds up the drive between two fingers like it's a poker chip.

I look at it. I don't reach for it. "What's on it?"

"The scraping tool I built when we did the pension story. It'll chew through those contracts in an hour, maybe two, once it's pointed right. I wrote it for you anyway, back then, remember?"

I remember. I remember a lot of things I'm not going to say out loud, per the arrangement we made last spring after the divorce was finalized, which was basically don't talk about it, either of us, ever, and it's held up pretty well for two people who were married eight years.

"Okay, so what's the catch," I say, because there's always a catch with Tom, he never just hands you a thing.

"There's no catch. There's a price." He's opening the takeout bag while he talks, handing me a container and a plastic fork like he still knows what I order, which he does, which is annoying. "You crack the story, you let me buy you dinner. After you file. Somewhere with tablecloths."

"That's it? Dinner?"

"That's it. And we don't talk about the divorce."

"We never talk about the divorce."

"Right, that's been going great for both of us." He shrugs, and I catch myself watching his hands, he's got these steady hands, always had, he fixed my laptop keyboard with a pocketknife at 2 a.m. once like it was nothing. "Look, Dinah, I like the story. You know I like the story. The contracts angle, the shell companies, that's fun. And you've got half of it wrong, the math side, and I can't stand watching you get it wrong on the internet."

I eat a bite of pad thai and think about it, which takes about four seconds because I'm desperate and he knows I'm desperate and we both know he knows. "Fine. Dinner after filing. No divorce talk. But if your tool corrupts anything I'm keeping your sister's Christmas card money."

"She'll be devastated. Deal." He plugs the drive into my machine and starts pointing at my screen, and I have to lean in close to see what he's pointing at, and that's the first time I notice the heat of his arm, just off my shoulder, not touching me but there, like a radiator you forgot was on.

We work. That's the weird part, how fast we fall back into it. He runs the scrape and I feed him the document names I've already prepped and he builds a join in what feels like ninety seconds and suddenly there's a clean table on my screen where an hour ago there was mush. He hums when he works, some tuneless thing, and I'd forgotten about the humming and I don't tell him to stop, which surprises me. Our rhythm comes back like a language you took in school, clumsy for ten minutes and then just there.

"How'd you find the second shell company, anyway," he asks, scrolling.

"Lillian Chen's parking stubs. She's been meeting someone at a garage on Forty-First every other Tuesday and I tailed the plates."

"You tailed plates? You? You once got lost driving to our own wedding venue."

"That was one time and the GPS was wrong."

"The GPS was fine, you were stubborn." He's grinning at his screen, not at me, and I feel my face go warm in a way that has nothing to do with the servers. Which is stupid. He's my ex. We agreed on the divorce together, I picked the lawyer, I did all of it on purpose. But my body is apparently a separate department that didn't get the memo, because I keep noticing things, the way he rolls his sleeves to the elbow, the smell of him under the takeout, some soap I probably bought him years ago, and the steadiness of his hands on the keys, and I have to keep dragging my eyes back to the table like a professional.

"Concentrate, Dinah," I say, mostly to myself.

"On what?" he says, not even looking up, and I don't answer him.

It's going great is the thing. It's going so great that at 2:40 in the morning I've got the whole structure of the story mapped, the contracts, the middleman, the two councilmen, everything sitting there in one beautiful sheet, and I lean back in my chair and actually say "ha" out loud like a person who has solved something.

And then the screen goes gray.

Just like that, mid-save, the whole thing, a little dialog box pops up saying the file couldn't be written and the server connection was lost, and my stomach drops through the floor into the parking garage below us.

"No," I say. "No no no."

Tom leans over. "Server error. They migrate these things on Thursdays, I forgot, I'm sorry, I literally forgot about the Thursday migration."

"You forgot about the Thursday migration?"

"It's almost three, I forgot! Okay, don't spiral. How often do you autosave?"

"Every ten minutes, but the autosaves are on the same server, if the write failed they're..."

"Corrupt, yeah. Okay. Okay." He's already turned back to his machine, typing fast, those steady hands not hesitating at all while I sit there doing math on how badly I'm about to miss the biggest deadline of my career. "The cache might still have chunks. There's a local temp folder the tool writes to before it commits, if I can pull those I can rebuild most of the table, maybe all of it, but it's slow, it's going to take till dawn."

"Till dawn? It's due at noon."

"Till dawn means you make noon. It means we're here all night, Dinah." He looks at me then, finally, and there's something in his face I can't quite file under colleague. "I'll stay. Obviously I'll stay. Coffee machine still steal money?"

"Still steals money," I say, and I go get two cups while he digs through my temp folders, and on the walk back across that dark empty newsroom I catch myself thinking that being trapped here with him until sunrise might not be the worst thing that's happened to me in a year.

The file restore sits at eleven percent and crawling, and Tom says the tool won't let us touch anything until it finishes, so we just sit there in the blue glow like two people stuck in an elevator. I've got my chair turned toward his screen and my feet up on the desk and my second coffee going cold, and honestly the panic has drained out of me and left something looser behind, that tired-open feeling you get at three in the morning when you know the worst is handled.

"So can I ask you a question that isn't about shell companies," he says, leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head.

"Depends."

"When did you last have sex?"

I almost spit coffee. "Excuse me?"

"I'm not being a creep, I'm asking because you've been looking at me for the last hour like I'm the last cigarette in the pack, and I figured we should either talk about it or stop pretending."

"That's, wow, that is not a question you ask your ex-husband."

"I just did. So?"

And this is the crucial point, I could have laughed it off, I've had a year of practice laughing it off, but it's 3