My days were a blur of back-to-back Zoom calls, micromanaging junior associates, and pretending to care about fourth-quarter profit margins. My nights were worse—three hours of restless sleep punctuated by the phantom buzzing of my work phone. The tension lived in my shoulders like a permanent tenant. My jaw ached from grinding my teeth. I had forgotten what it felt like to take a breath that didn't have an agenda attached.
Not the frustrating kind of lost. The dreamlike kind. Every turn I took seemed to lead to a street I had never seen, though I'd lived in Westbrook for a decade. The address numbers skipped from 118 to 122, with no 120 in between. A cat—a sleek, impossibly black creature with emerald eyes—sat on a mossy stone wall, watching me. monique-s secret spa- part 1
I took a sick day. The first one in four years. I didn't plan to go anywhere. I simply started walking, letting my feet carry me away from the glass towers and into the older part of town. The part where Victorian houses leaned toward each other like gossiping old friends, their paint peeling gently, their gardens overgrown with intentional neglect. My days were a blur of back-to-back Zoom