The disaster began with tea.
Specifically, a paper cup filled too generously with steaming, overly sweet milk tea, balanced precariously in Liyana's right hand while her left clutched a notebook older than most of her friendships.
She was late.
Late for a meeting she didn't want to attend, about a project she wasn't sure she believed in anymore, in a city that had recently begun to feel too loud, too demanding, too uninterested in her quiet disappointments.
She turned a corner too quickly.
At the exact same moment, Arman was walking backward.
Not metaphorically—literally.
"I'm telling you," he said into his phone, "if people stopped romanticizing suffering, half of literature would disappear."
He took another step back.
They collided.
The tea launched itself into the air, performing a brief, elegant arc before landing directly on Liyana's notebook. Pages bloomed brown. Ink ran like it was trying to escape.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Liyana gasped.
"My grandmother's handwriting!"
Arman stared at the dripping notebook, then at her face, which had gone pale in a way that suggested this was not about stationery.
"I—I'm so sorry," he said, panicking. "I wasn't looking—"
"Do you have any idea," she interrupted, her voice shaking, "how dead she is?"
He froze.
"I—what?"
"She died," Liyana clarified, inhaling sharply, as if correcting herself. "Years ago. That was the only thing she left me that wasn't furniture."
"Oh," Arman said faintly. "Oh no. I didn't mean to—wait, why am I apologizing? You ran into me."
She blinked at him. "You were walking backward like a philosophical crab."
He stared at her.
Then he laughed.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't polite. It was the kind of laugh that escaped before permission could be asked for.
Liyana stared at him like she was deciding whether to slap him or join him.
Against her will, she laughed too.
"Well," Arman said, wiping rain and tea off his sleeve, "this is either the beginning of a beautiful friendship or a lawsuit."
She sighed. "I don't have the energy for either."
He crouched down, carefully lifting the ruined notebook. "Let me help. I know a way to dry pages without destroying them."
She hesitated.
"I repair old books," he added. "And instruments. And occasionally my own bad decisions."
That earned him a reluctant smile.
They walked together to a nearby café, dripping onto the floor, arguing over whether fate was romantic or lazy, whether accidents mattered more than intentions.
By the time the notebook was laid out to dry, something subtle had shifted.
Neither of them knew it yet.
But years later, both would remember this moment—not as the day they fell in love, but as the day everything quietly, irreversibly went wrong.