CHAPTER ONE FROM “THE COTTAGE IN THE LEMON GARDEN”

 CHAPTER ONE

I'm really tired, thought Emily as she attended the second meeting of the day. Her head hurt. She looked at the screen with the graphs and drawings and wondered if she could go on much longer. She looked closely at her colleagues sitting at the meeting table and their faces were lifeless; for a moment she had the impression that she was not living, but surviving. "How did I get here?" she asked himself as she looked out the large windows of one of the great skyscrapers that populate New York City. "How did I forget who I am?" "Mrs. Smith, what do you think about what your colleague Susan just said?" Emily looked at her boss, who was watching her from the 10 back of the large conference table with the usual look of someone who wants to rip you off and make your life impossible. At this question her colleagues turned in her direction and looked at her with that blank, submissive look they had always had stamped on their faces. Emily suddenly heard a little voice inside her say, "Now I'm going to tell him to go to hell!!! Now is the time to do it! Emily rebel! It is time to change your life! No more getting up at the crack of dawn, taking the always crowded subway going to the cafe below the office and elbowing your way in to order a simple coffee'. No more!!! " She glared at her boss and replied: "Boss, I have no idea what my colleague Susan said, and I don't give a damn," then she calmly got up from her chair and walked over to her employer, who was looking at her with a look of surprise at her inappropriate behavior, and threw the reports she had written and spent several months preparing under his nose without ever receiving a thank you or an acknowledgement, let alone a promotion 11 Emily put her mouth close to the man's ear and whispered, "Do you know where you can put my reports?" At these words the man stood up and shouted, "Get out of my office, get out of my company. " she looked at him smiling and replied, "I will very gladly leave and tell all my colleagues who are watching me to wake up that there is only one life." And she turned and walked out of the room, slamming the door. The secretary who was sitting outside at her desk next to the door of the meeting room heard the door slam and took off her glasses and looked at her with her usual squeamish look, Emily had put up with it for so many years she decided it was time she did the same. "And you, Dorothy, I suggest you take that look off your big face because I'm in a bad mood today," the woman said as she got up and hid in the copy room. Emily laughed and happily made her way to her office, taking only her laptop, her parents' photo, and her coffee mug that her brother had given her. She put everything in her bag and walked out, calling out to her colleagues who were working in the big hall with their greedy heads. 12 "I salute you, I, Emily, decided today to change my life. In fact, I decided to live." She took the elevator and left the skyscraper with satisfaction. She began to walk and a happiness filled her heart. She felt light now that her new life was beginning. Now the real Emily could truly call herself happy.

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