I’d just flown in to New York and it was all going horribly wrong. Then a fortune teller told me something bad was about to happen ...

I was in New York to visit my friend, M, who had moved there a year earlier. She had an apartment with a spare mattress and I had a terrible fear of being alone over the holidays. It was a match made in heaven.

Except now it was the night before Christmas and I was alone. We’d made tentative plans to meet in Chinatown but she hadn’t responded to any of my texts or calls since my plane had landed a few hours earlier.