The coffee machine hated me.

It wasn't the first time — the ancient thing had been sputtering and groaning for weeks — but today, on the morning of the worst day of my life, it finally gave up entirely and died with a dramatic hiss of steam.

I stared at it.

It stared back.

"Perfect," I muttered, grabbing my bag and heading out into the grey London morning without breakfast, without coffee, and without the slightest idea that my entire life was about to change.

I found out I was being let go at exactly 9:17am.

My manager, Derek, had the decency to look slightly uncomfortable as he slid the small envelope across his desk toward me. Restructuring, he called it. Budget cuts. His eyes didn't quite meet mine.

I'd worked at Harlow & Associates for two years. Two years of early mornings, late nights, covering shifts that weren't mine and smiling through meetings that should've been emails.

And it ended in four minutes.

I walked out of the building with a box of my things — a plant, a mug, and a framed photo of my mum — and stood on the pavement while London rushed past me, completely indifferent to the fact that my life had just fallen apart.

I needed coffee.

The café around the corner was packed, the queue snaking out the door, but I joined it anyway because I had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do and sometimes you just need to stand somewhere warm.

I was checking my bank balance — a mistake, always a mistake — when I turned and walked directly into a wall.

Except the wall was a person.

A very tall, very expensively dressed person, and my coffee — the one I'd just paid for, the one I desperately needed — went directly onto the front of his very white, very crisp shirt.

Time stopped.

I looked up.

He looked down.

The man staring at me had the kind of face you didn't forget — sharp jaw, darker eyes, the sort of expression that made junior executives cry in stairwells. He wasn't angry, exactly. He was something worse.

He was completely, utterly unbothered.

"I'm so sorry," I breathed, grabbing napkins from the counter and pressing them uselessly against his chest. "I wasn't looking where I was going, I'll pay for the dry cleaning, I'm so—"

"Stop." His voice was low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that made you listen.

I stopped.

He looked down at the napkins in my hand, then at me, then removed them from my grip with two fingers like I'd handed him something mildly offensive.

"It's fine," he said.

Then his phone rang. He answered it, turned, and walked away.

No name. No scene. No anger.

Just gone.

I stood there holding a fistful of soggy napkins, jobless and coffeless in the middle of London, watching a stranger in a ruined shirt disappear into the crowd.

I didn't even get his name.

I wouldn't think about him again.

Or so I told myself.