Veronica Hayes crumpled to her knees, the cold, unforgiving tile of Grand Central Terminal’s main concourse a brutal finality against her skin. A sob, raw and ragged, tore from her throat. Around her, the Monday morning rush was a relentless river of humanity, a torrent of hurried footsteps, rumbling suitcases, and clipped conversations.

People flowed past her, a blur of motion and indifference. Some cast fleeting, sympathetic glances; others pointedly turned away, their expressions a mask of urban stoicism. No one stopped.

New York City has little time for another’s tears, especially on a Monday morning when everyone is racing toward their own urgent destinations. A woman in an Amtrak uniform shot her a disapproving look and muttered something into her shoulder radio. Probably calling security, Veronica thought with a detached sense of clarity.

To remove the public nuisance. She understood, but she couldn’t move. Her legs refused to obey, and a fault line had just cracked open right through the center of her world.

It felt as if that departing train was pulling away with the last frayed thread of her hope. “Now departing on Track 32,” a woman’s disembodied voice announced from the speakers above, smooth and indifferent. “The 8:15 Acela Express to Providence.”

The voice was eerily similar to the one she’d heard on the phone a month ago.

“Unfortunately, Ms. Hayes, due to departmental restructuring, your position has been eliminated.” The same dry, lifeless tone, as if reading a schedule rather than dictating the fate of a human being. Thirteen years.

She had given that school thirteen years of her life. Thirteen, an unlucky number. She should have left last year when another school had offered her a position, but she’d refused.

She couldn’t abandon her third-graders in the middle of the school year. And now, they had shown her no such loyalty. Her train, the one carrying her to the interview that was supposed to fix everything, was gone.

And here she sat, with a broken heel, mascara streaking down her face like black tears, and a heart full of shattered hopes. All because of the cursed subway. “Signal malfunctions,” they’d called it.

The station closure, the suffocating crush of bodies on the escalators, and then, the final insult—the snap of her heel as she ran up the last flight of stairs. Why had she worn these shoes? But it wasn’t about the heel.