The loud crash of a plate smashing on the floor was the final straw for Daniel Bryan. There was no way he could go on like this. A large stack of bills, some of them final demands for payment, sat on the table in front of him. It was lunch time, and he was one of only three people sitting in his restaurant, a fact which further compounded his misery. Two customers in the place on a Wednesday lunch time. How had it ever gotten to be this bad? How had he managed his hotel and restaurant business so badly?

"You knocked it off there! You fucking clean it up!" a woman screamed in the kitchen, her voice clearly audible even through the closed door. The two customers tried to pretend that they hadn't heard. Despite being the only people to order food, their starters had so far taken more than twenty minutes to arrive, and now one of them was presumably lying on the kitchen floor.

When they had started their own business, Daniel and his wife, Brie, couldn't have been happier. Running a hotel and restaurant had been their dream. Daniel had even insisted on naming it Brianna's, in her honour. But now it was failing, and it was taking their home and their life savings with it. Within weeks, they would be bankrupt and living on the streets, and Daniel felt powerless to stop it. It was too late. Right here and now, it was already over.

Deciding that enough was enough, he resigned himself to the fact that he had to go and break his wife's heart, and therefore his own as well. With a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach, he got up and headed for the office, having seen Brie in there ten minutes earlier. As he walked past the door to the kitchen, the woman with the loud and angry voice charged through it and nearly barged into him.

"I've had about all I can take," she barked at him on her way past, as if whatever disagreement she had just had was his fault entirely.

"Stephanie!" Daniel called after her, but she had stormed out of the restaurant in the direction of the reception area and the main entrance. Daniel wondered if she would walk out and that would be the last he would see of her. Unlikely, given that her husband was the Head Chef at Brianna's.

A minute later, Daniel reluctantly walked into the office. He was ashamed to even look his wife in the eyes. "Brie? I..."

"I don't believe it!" Brie exclaimed, turning away from her computer screen and smiling up at him. "We got accepted!"

"Accepted for what, babe?" Daniel asked, assuming she had applied for another loan, as if further delaying the inevitable would help at this point.

"That TV show I told you about," she beamed. "The Hotel Inspector. I applied for it and they accepted us! I just got an email from them. We're going to be episode number one! Can you believe it? They're going to come save us, Daniel!" She stood up from the desk, rushed over to him and embraced him tightly. Anyone watching her would have thought that their problems were already behind them.

Knowing that was far from the truth, Daniel wasn't sure if even this TV show and its mystery hotel inspector could save Brianna's at this point. At least it was some kind of hope to cling to for now. "That's great, babe," he said, managing to sound more excited about it than he felt. "Who is this hotel inspector?"

"I don't know. That's kind of the point, I assume. All they've said in the email is that they'll reserve a room at some point in the next couple of weeks and then show up with a camera crew in tow. We'd better go tell everyone. We need to make sure to be at our best now for when they come. You know they're going to go through this place from top to bottom."

"Jesus Christ," Daniel muttered to himself. "They don't know what they've gotten themselves into."