The day he was fired, Manhattan left him no door open

Darren Cole was laid off in the rain. Human Resources slid a sealed envelope across the conference table and spoke with the calm of a grocery receipt: “Corporate restructuring. Effective today. Your system access will be cut in thirty minutes.” Darren stared at the cold coffee in front of him. He was twenty-seven, and for four years he had worked as a risk-data clerk at a community bank on the edge of Wall Street, plugging in customer statements, credit-card delinquencies, trading exceptions, and loan-review records. The work was so repetitive it felt almost insulting. He had been a machine that never missed a number. Now the machine was being written off as overhead. On the way out, he ran into his former boss, Grant Wheeler.