That evening, as he sat in his penthouse apartment overlooking the Seattle skyline, Daniel found himself unable to focus on his work. The encounter with the beggar replayed in his mind, the sharpness of his words, the vulnerability in her eyes. He couldn’t quite understand why it bothered him, why it felt personal.

Over the next few days, the feeling didn’t dissipate. Daniel began to lose sleep, haunted by an image of those eyes that seemed so familiar yet so foreign. He became increasingly distracted and irritable, which did not go unnoticed by his business partner, James.

“Daniel, what’s going on with you?” James asked one afternoon in their glass-walled office. “You’ve been on edge since the market incident. Is everything okay?”