The fluorescent lights in the diner buzzed like angry wasps at three in the morning. Emma Laurent's hand cramped around the coffee pot as she refilled cup after cup for the late-night crowd—truckers, insomniacs, nurses coming off shift. Her feet screamed in her sensible flats, the ones with the worn-down heels she kept meaning to replace but couldn't afford to.
This was job number two.
Job number one had been her real job—well, what used to be her real job—at Morrison & Associates, where she'd spent the last two years drafting blueprints and dreaming of the day she'd see her name on a building. Where she'd actually gotten to use her architecture degree instead of just making payments on it.
Job number three would start in four hours. Weekend receptionist at a dental office. Glamorous.
"More coffee, sweetheart," a trucker called, waving his empty mug.
Emma smiled—the customer service smile she'd perfected, the one that didn't reach her eyes—and made her way over. Her phone buzzed in her apron pocket. She didn't need to check it to know it was another email from the hospital. Another bill for Grandma Rose's treatment. Another number with too many zeros that made her stomach twist into knots.
The diner shift ended at six. She had just enough time to go home, shower away the smell of grease and desperation, and make it to Morrison & Associates by eight-thirty. She'd pulled worse schedules. She'd survive this one too.
She always survived.
The Morrison & Associates building gleamed in the early morning sun, all glass and steel and architectural ambition. Emma had fallen in love with it the first time she'd seen it. Now, walking through those revolving doors, she felt only bone-deep exhaustion and the faint flutter of hope that maybe, just maybe, today would be the day Mr. Morrison recognized her work on the Riverside project.
She'd spent three months on those designs. Three months of late nights and careful calculations, creating affordable housing that was actually beautiful, actually livable. Housing for people like her, people who worked three jobs and still couldn't make ends meet.
Her colleague, Brad Fucking Henderson, had presented it yesterday.
Her work. His name.
And she'd smiled through it because that's what you did when you were twenty-five and drowning in debt and couldn't afford to make waves. You smiled and took it and hoped that loyalty meant something.
"Emma." Mr. Morrison's assistant appeared at her desk before she'd even set down her bag. "He wants to see you. Now."
The flutter of hope became a full-fledged butterfly. This was it. He'd realized the truth. He was going to give her credit, maybe even the promotion she'd been working toward—
"Close the door," Mr. Morrison said when she entered his corner office.
She did. Her hands were shaking slightly. God, she needed sleep.
"I'm going to get straight to the point." He didn't look at her, just shuffled papers on his desk like they were more interesting than her entire career. "We're letting you go."
The words didn't compute at first. They sounded foreign, like a language she'd forgotten how to speak.
"I—what?"
"Your position is being eliminated. Effective immediately." He finally looked up, and there was nothing in his eyes. No remorse. No recognition of the fact that she'd bled for this company. "Brad brought some concerns to my attention about your... collaborative abilities."
Brad. Of course.
"Collaborative—" She stopped herself, swallowed the anger that tasted like battery acid. "Mr. Morrison, the Riverside project was my design. Every blueprint, every calculation—"
"And that's the problem, isn't it?" He leaned back in his chair, looking almost bored. "You're not a team player, Emma. Brad explained how difficult you made the process, how you refused to incorporate feedback, how you tried to claim sole credit for what was clearly a collaborative effort."
The room tilted slightly. "That's not— That's a complete lie. He stole my—"
"I'm not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth a senior associate." Morrison's voice hardened. "You're young, Emma. You'll find something else. But here's some free advice: learn when to be gracious. Learn when to share the spotlight. This industry doesn't reward difficult women."
Difficult women.
She'd heard those words before. In college when she'd corrected a professor's math. In her first internship when she'd suggested a more efficient design. Every single time she'd dared to be competent while female.
"Box up your desk. Security will escort you out."
Twenty minutes later, Emma stood on the sidewalk with a cardboard box full of her professional life and absolutely no idea what happened next. The box wasn't even that full. A coffee mug Grandma Rose had given her. A small succulent that had somehow survived her neglect. A framed photo of her and her grandmother at her college graduation, both of them grinning like they'd won the lottery.
That degree had cost everything. And for what?
Her phone buzzed again. The hospital. She couldn't even look at it.
The coffee shop across the street beckoned. She probably couldn't afford their overpriced lattes, but screw it. She'd just lost her real job. She was entitled to one ridiculously expensive moment of comfort.
The barista handed her the largest latte they made, and Emma turned toward the door, already mentally calculating which bills she could defer, which shifts she could pick up, how she was going to explain to Grandma Rose that—
She slammed directly into what felt like a brick wall.
The brick wall was wearing what had to be a five-thousand-dollar suit.
Her coffee—her beautiful, ridiculously expensive comfort coffee—exploded between them. Hot liquid soaked into expensive fabric. The cardboard box flew from her arms, contents scattering across the sidewalk.
"Jesus Christ," a voice said. Deep, cultured, furious.
Emma looked up.
And up.
The man was tall, well over six feet, with dark hair styled with casual precision and a face that belonged on magazine covers. Sharp jaw. Aristocratic nose. Lips that would've been almost pretty if they weren't currently pressed into a thin line of absolute fury.
But it was his eyes that stopped her cold.
Gray. Pale, cold gray, like winter ice.
They looked at her like she was something he'd scraped off his shoe.
"I am so sorry," Emma started, dropping to her knees to gather her scattered belongings. The photo frame had cracked. Perfect. Just perfect. "I wasn't watching where I—"
"Clearly." He didn't move to help, just stood there like a monument to wealth and disdain, examining the coffee stain spreading across his chest. "Do you have any idea what this suit costs?"
"I said I'm sorry—"
"Sorry doesn't pay for dry cleaning. Or replacement."
Emma's hands stilled on the cardboard box. She looked up at him again, this stranger with his cold eyes and his expensive suit and his complete lack of human empathy, and something inside her that had been bending all morning finally snapped.
"You know what? You're right. I can't pay for your suit." She stood, clutching her box with its cracked frame and wilted succulent. "I just lost my job because I'm apparently a 'difficult woman' who has the audacity to want credit for my own work. My grandmother is in the hospital with medical bills I can't pay. I'm working three jobs and I still can't make rent. So no, I cannot afford to replace your obviously very expensive suit, and I'm sorry about that, but I'm having what you might call a really bad day, so maybe you could find it in your cold, corporate heart to have just a tiny bit of human compassion."
She was breathing hard by the end of it. Her eyes were burning with tears she absolutely refused to let fall.
He stared at her. Just stared, his expression unreadable.
Then he reached into his jacket—the ruined, coffee-stained jacket—and pulled out a sleek black wallet. He extracted a business card and held it out to her.
"Send me the dry-cleaning bill," he said, his voice flat.
Emma took the card without looking at it, too angry and tired and defeated to even process the gesture.
He walked past her into the coffee shop, and she stood there on the sidewalk, her life in a box, her future a giant question mark, and a stranger's business card crumpling in her fist.
She was halfway down the block before curiosity made her look at it.
Alexander Sterling
CEO, Sterling Industries
There was a phone number below the name, embossed in silver.
Emma shoved the card in her pocket and kept walking. Rich men and their cards and their cold gray eyes—that was a world she didn't belong to and never would.
She didn't know that twelve hours later, her phone would ring.
She didn't know that the man with the cold eyes was about to change everything.
She didn't know that sometimes the worst day of your life is actually the beginning of something else entirely.
All she knew was that her coffee was gone, her job was gone, and she had four hours to figure out how to keep her entire world from falling apart.
It wasn't enough time.
It never was.