Leak for Me
Chapter One
The Stranger Upstairs
Emily Carter had always believed that the worst kind of loss was the one you could prepare for. She had accepted that people moved away, relationships ended, and memories faded with time. What she had never imagined was that an ordinary Thursday afternoon could erase years of her life with the click of a mouse.
For the third evening in a row, she sat at the small wooden desk in her apartment, staring at the pale glow of her laptop screen while the cursor blinked impatiently inside an empty folder.
The folder had once contained everything.
Three years’ worth of lesson plans.
Every presentation she had ever created for her students at Brookfield High School.
Photographs from family vacations.
Videos of birthdays she had promised herself she would never lose.
Scanned letters from her grandmother, who had passed away the previous winter.
The novel she had secretly been writing for nearly two years.
Now there was nothing.
She had searched every directory, every hidden folder, every recovery point she could find. She had downloaded software she barely understood, followed countless tutorials, and spent hours reading technology forums written in a language that felt completely foreign to her. Earlier that morning she had even visited a computer repair shop downtown, where a young technician had confidently assured her that recovering the files would be “no problem.”
Four hours later he had returned the laptop with an awkward smile and a refund.
“I’m sorry,” he had said. “Whatever happened to this computer isn’t something we can fix.”
That sentence had echoed in her mind ever since.
Whatever happened...
It sounded less like a technical problem and more like a disaster.
Emily leaned back in her chair and rubbed her tired eyes. The digital clock on the microwave read 8:47 p.m., although time had become meaningless during the past three days. She had barely eaten, barely slept, and had called in sick to work for the first time since becoming a teacher. She couldn’t imagine standing in front of thirty teenagers while pretending everything was normal.
Tomorrow she would have to explain to the principal why the end-of-term reports were missing.
She dreaded that conversation almost as much as she dreaded opening another empty folder.
Her phone buzzed on the table.
The caller ID displayed Margaret Collins – Principal.
Emily watched the screen until the call stopped.
A voicemail notification appeared almost immediately.
She couldn’t bring herself to listen.
Silence settled over the apartment once again.
Outside, rain tapped gently against the windows while distant traffic hummed through the city below. Normally she loved rainy evenings. They made grading essays feel cozy. Tonight the sound only reminded her how alone she was.
Without thinking, she closed the laptop, slipped it into its bag, pulled on a light sweater, and stepped into the hallway.
She didn’t have a destination in mind.
She simply needed to leave the apartment before the walls closed in around her.
The building was quiet, illuminated only by warm ceiling lights that cast long shadows across the staircase. Instead of waiting for the elevator, Emily began climbing the stairs slowly, one hand resting on the railing while the laptop bag hung heavily from her shoulder.
By the time she reached the seventh floor, her legs had grown tired.
She stopped beside a wide window overlooking the city.
Hundreds of lights shimmered below like scattered stars, reflected across rain-soaked streets. Normally she would have taken a photograph.
Tonight she barely noticed the view.
She lowered herself onto the top step, wrapped both arms around the laptop bag, and finally allowed the tears she had been holding back for days to fall.
She wasn’t sobbing.
She wasn’t screaming.
She simply cried in exhausted silence.
“Are you alright?”
The voice was calm, neither intrusive nor overly concerned.
Emily looked up.
A man stood a few steps above her, balancing two grocery bags in one hand while searching his pockets for his apartment keys with the other.
He appeared to be in his late twenties, dressed in dark jeans and a charcoal sweater despite the mild weather. His brown hair looked as though he had run his fingers through it too many times during the day, and a pair of rectangular glasses rested low on his nose.
She recognized him immediately.
He lived upstairs.
They had exchanged polite smiles in passing over the past several months but had never spoken beyond the occasional “Good morning.”
Embarrassed, Emily quickly wiped her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to make a scene.”
He offered a reassuring smile.
“You aren’t.”
There was a brief silence before he continued.
“I’m Lucas, by the way.”
“Emily.”
“I know.”
She looked at him, surprised.
“You do?”
“You leave for work every weekday at exactly seven-thirty. I usually make coffee around the same time.”
A faint laugh escaped her before she could stop it.
“That sounds slightly creepy.”
“It did the moment I said it out loud.”
His grin widened.
“I meant that our schedules overlap.”
“I’m relieved.”
For the first time in three days, Emily felt the weight on her chest lighten, if only for a moment.
Lucas noticed the laptop bag resting beside her.
“Long week?”
“You have no idea.”
“Computer trouble?”
She looked at him curiously.
“What makes you think it’s the computer?”
“The way you’re holding the bag. Most people don’t carry a laptop onto the stairwell unless they’re trying very hard not to throw it through a window.”
Despite herself, she laughed again.
“You might actually be right.”
He set the grocery bags down beside the wall.
“What happened?”
Emily hesitated.
Normally she would never unload her problems onto someone she barely knew.
But exhaustion has a way of dissolving the walls people spend years building.
“My files disappeared,” she admitted. “Everything I need for work is gone. I teach English at Brookfield High, and every lesson I’ve created since I started teaching was on that laptop. Family photos, personal journals... everything. I’ve spent three days trying to recover it, and the repair shop couldn’t do anything.”
Lucas listened without interrupting.
When she finished, he asked only one question.
“Would you mind if I took a look?”
“You know computers?”
“I write security software.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“As in...”
“I’m a software engineer. Cybersecurity, mostly.”
Emily stared at him for a moment before letting out a quiet sigh.
“If you had asked me yesterday, I would’ve said absolutely not.”
“And today?”
“I’ve run out of people to ask.”
Lucas nodded toward his apartment door.
“My place is just upstairs. No pressure. If all I can tell you is that the repair shop was right, at least you’ll know.”
Emily considered the offer.
Every instinct reminded her that trusting strangers wasn’t wise.
Yet Lucas didn’t feel like a stranger anymore.
He had noticed she was upset without demanding an explanation.
He hadn’t promised miracles.
He hadn’t tried to impress her.
He had simply offered help.
“Okay,” she said at last.
Lucas’s apartment looked exactly how she imagined a software engineer’s home might look—simple, organized, and dominated by technology. Three monitors occupied a large desk beneath a bookshelf filled with programming manuals, novels, and several small potted plants that looked surprisingly healthy.
“You can sit wherever you’d like,” he said. “Coffee?”
“I probably shouldn’t.”
“Tea?”
She smiled.
“Tea sounds perfect.”
While the kettle heated, Lucas carefully placed her laptop on the desk and connected a small external drive.
Emily watched from across the room, cradling the warm mug between her hands.
For several minutes, neither of them spoke.
Only the soft tapping of Lucas’s keyboard filled the apartment.
His expression gradually shifted.
The relaxed confidence disappeared.
His eyebrows narrowed.
Emily noticed immediately.
“What is it?”
Lucas didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he opened another window, typed several commands, and examined the results with increasing concentration.
Finally he leaned back.
“Emily...”
Something in his voice made her stomach tighten.
“This wasn’t an accident.”
She set the mug down.
“What do you mean?”
“Your hard drive is healthy.”
“So... that’s good?”
“It is.”
He turned one of the monitors toward her.
“It also means your files didn’t simply disappear.”
Hope flickered across her face.
“They’re still there?”
“They’re somewhere.”
He paused.
“But someone has been inside your computer.”
The room suddenly felt much quieter.
Emily stared at him, certain she had misunderstood.
“Someone... accessed my laptop?”
Lucas nodded slowly.
“I can’t tell you who.”
“I can’t even tell you when.”
“But I can tell you this...”
He looked back at the screen.
“Whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing.”
Emily felt the color drain from her face.
The missing files were no longer her biggest problem.
Someone, somewhere, had chosen her.
And neither of them yet understood why.
