My Mafia Boss Saw Me — His 240-Pound “Invisible” Secretary — in a Tight Velvet Dress and Whispered “Who Are You Planning to Kiss After Work?” Three Hours Later He Carved a Message Into the Man Who Tricked Me Into That Date, and Said Two Words That Started a War
Part 3
The heavy oak doors of the penthouse office snapped shut, cutting off the low hum of Chicago traffic far below.
Dominic Hale stood blocking the exit, the custom tailoring of his Italian suit doing nothing to hide the lethal tension coiled through his shoulders.
A single stripe of crimson stained his crisp white collar — a stark contrast to the cold, dead calm in his gray eyes.
He stepped closer, his gaze trailing down the tight, unforgiving curves of the burgundy velvet dress his secretary had dared to wear.
Then the boss whispered his question — who was she planning to kiss after work in that dress — and the jealousy in his gravelly voice sounded more like a sentence than a question.
To understand how Sadie Kowalski ended up in that room, you have to go back to the morning.
Sadie was a woman who had mastered the art of disappearing in plain sight.
At 240 pounds, she had learned that the world generally preferred to look straight through her, and in the ruthless hierarchy of Caldera Logistics, being overlooked was a survival skill.
For three years she had been the indispensable executive assistant to Dominic Hale — a man whose legitimate shipping empire was a polished steel front for the most powerful underground syndicate in the Midwest.
She kept his calendar, managed his offshore accounts, and made a point of never asking about the men with broken noses and bulging jackets who came by after hours.
She was efficient, loyal, and unapologetically large, having traded the exhausting pursuit of thinness long ago for the comfortable armor of loose cardigans and sensible flats.
Her boss, a man who dated runway models, had never once looked twice at her.
That was how she wanted it — or so she told herself, every night, in an apartment that held only her and a cat.
But it was a Friday in late November, and the wind whipping off Lake Michigan had blown in something reckless.
That night she wasn’t going home to leftovers.
That night, she had a date.
His name was Brody — a charming accountant from a Wicker Park coffee shop who had looked at her with what seemed like real interest and invited her to dinner at the Brassline Chop House.
To mark the occasion, Sadie had marched into a boutique and paid an obscene sum for a burgundy velvet wrap dress that clung to her chest, cinched her thick waist, and poured itself over the wide flare of her hips.
The dress refused to hide her size.
It turned her size into a weapon.
When she stepped off the private elevator that morning, the silence on the executive floor was deafening.
Yvonne, the perpetually sour receptionist who lived on green juice and spite, dropped her expensive pen.
Rourke, the towering, scar-faced head of security, paused mid-stride and offered a low, appreciative whistle.
“Looking sharp, Kowalski,” he rumbled.
“Big plans?”
“Just dinner,” Sadie managed, hurrying to her desk with heat rising in her cheeks.
At four o’clock, the intercom buzzed with a sharp, impatient tone.
“My office.
Now.”
She found Dominic at the floor-to-ceiling windows with his back to her, the skyline darkening beyond him.
He was a frighteningly handsome man of 34 — sharp, aristocratic features, dark hair clipped short, and the heavy build of a bare-knuckle fighter, a remnant of his violent rise through the South Side.
“The customs clearance for the Rotterdam shipment is finalized,” she began, professional and steady.
“And the alderman called again about the warehouse zoning permits.”
He turned slowly, a crystal tumbler in his hand, and for one suffocating moment he didn’t look at her face at all.
His pale gray eyes dragged over the velvet — the deep neckline, the cinched waist, the curve of her heavy thighs — and the air in the room seemed to thin.
Then he crossed the carpet and stopped inches away, close enough that she had to tilt her head back, close enough to smell bergamot and something faintly metallic underneath.
He told her, his voice low, that in three years he had never seen her in anything but shapeless wool and gray slacks.
“You dress like a widow mourning a husband who died thirty years ago.
And today you walk into my office looking like this.”
His knuckles brushed the velvet at her collarbone, agonizingly light, and electricity shot straight through her.
“It’s Friday,” she whispered, heart slamming against her ribs.
“I have plans tonight.”
His jaw clenched, a muscle feathering violently beneath the skin.
“Plans.
With who?”
“That’s my private business, Dominic.”
His eyes darkened to the color of a storm.
His hand came up and caught her jaw — firm, not cruel — tilting her face toward his.
“I don’t like secrets in my organization.
I don’t like wild cards.
And I certainly don’t like another man looking at what belongs in my office.”
His thumb traced her lower lip.
“Whoever he is, he doesn’t deserve the privilege.”
Sadie broke from his grip, mumbled something about filing reports, and fled to her desk with her pulse roaring in her ears.
Her boss had just looked at her soft, heavy body not with disgust but with a terrifying, predatory hunger.
By 5:30 her nerves were shredded.
She grabbed her coat and rode down into the freezing evening, lecturing herself in the cab the whole way to Rush Street.
He was a control freak who treated employees like property.
A power play.
Nothing more.
The steakhouse was warm and crowded, fragrant with seared beef and expensive cabernet.
Brody rose from a corner booth, sandy-haired and catalog-handsome, and took her hand.
“You look absolutely stunning.
That dress was made for you.”
A genuine blush warmed her face.
The first glass of wine went perfectly — they laughed about the weather, shared an appetizer, traded easy questions.
Then the conversation took a subtle, jagged turn.
“So.
Caldera Logistics,” Brody said, leaning his elbows on the white tablecloth.
“Quite the operation.
All those routes down the Mississippi — and the cargo coming off the Canadian border.
Does Hale handle that routing personally, or do you manage the schedules?”
Sadie froze, the wine turning bitter on her tongue.
The northern routes existed nowhere on paper.
They moved untraceable cash and unlicensed firearms, and no ordinary accountant on a first date could possibly know to ask about them.
She looked up.
The easy smile was still in place, but the blue eyes above it were flat, calculating, and empty of warmth.
“I just handle his calendar,” she said carefully.
“I wouldn’t know anything about routes.”
“Come on,” he chuckled, without a trace of humor.
“A smart girl with top clearance knows everything.
A friend of mine is curious how Caldera clears the northern checkpoints so fast.”
Her blood went cold, and she reached slowly for her purse.
“I think I should go.”
His hand shot across the table and clamped her wrist, fingers digging deep into the soft flesh.
“Don’t be like that.
We haven’t even ordered dinner.”
Across the restaurant, in a dim booth near the bar, a man in a dark suit lowered his newspaper.
Dominic Hale had been watching the table for half an hour.
When he saw the grip on her wrist, he didn’t blink — he simply drew out his phone and sent a single encrypted message.
At the booth, the last of Brody’s charm evaporated into a cold rasp.
“My employers want the Canadian schedules.
You’re going to come somewhere quiet, open your laptop, and show me the logistics software.
Do that, and you walk away.”
He didn’t bother finishing the alternative.
The truth of it crashed over her all at once.
There had been no spark in a coffee shop.
No man charmed by her laugh.
She had been targeted — a lonely, vulnerable, overweight woman holding the keys to the most dangerous man in Chicago — and she had walked into it wearing brand-new velvet.
Tears of humiliation stung her eyes.
“I don’t have my laptop,” she whispered.
“Then we’ll go to your office,” he said, hauling her to her feet.
“Keep quiet, smile, and walk.”
He steered her through the crowded dining room and out into the freezing night — then yanked her sharply right, toward the narrow service alley behind the kitchens.
Her boots slipped on black ice.
“Where are we going?”
“Car’s out back.
Shut up and walk.”
The alley smelled of rotting produce and stale beer, and the street sounds faded behind the hum of a generator.
With a sickening jolt she understood that if he got her into a car back here, she was never coming home.
She stopped, planted her heavy boots, and dropped her weight like an anchor.
“No.
I’m not going anywhere with you.”
He spun, face twisting, and pulled a suppressed pistol from under his jacket.
“Listen to me, you fat—” he spat the word.
“Get in the car, or I put a bullet in your knee and drag you.”
Sadie squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the pain.
It never arrived.
A V8 engine roared down the narrow alley from the far end, headlights blinding, and a matte-black armored SUV skidded to a stop on the frost-slick pavement inches from Brody.
The passenger door kicked open with bone-cracking force, caught him square in the chest, and launched him backward into a stack of empty steel kegs.
Rourke stepped out without a word and kicked the pistol from his hand so hard the metal shattered against the bricks.
Brody screamed that his ribs were broken, scrambling backward on the greasy pavement.
Then the rear door opened, and measured footsteps echoed off the walls.
Dominic stepped into the glare of the headlights, stripped to his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled over forearms corded with muscle and faded ink.
The cold calm was back in his eyes — wrapped now in an aura of pure violence.
He didn’t look at Sadie.
“Rourke.
Hold him up.”
The enforcer hauled Brody up by the collar and pinned him to the brick.
“You’re making a mistake,” Brody gasped, spitting blood.
“The Brennan family won’t let this go.
Touch me and the truce is dead.”
“The Brennans sent a rat to seduce my secretary and steal my manifests,” Dominic said, stepping closer.
“The truce died the second you touched her.”
Brody choked out that she was a liability.
“Look at her — pathetic, lonely.
You think a woman like that has the stomach for your world?
She’s weak.”
Sadie flinched as if struck, shrinking against the wall, wrapping her arms around her waist, trying to make herself small inside the beautiful dress.
Dominic tilted his head, studying the man.
“You have a very poor understanding of value.
And a profound lack of respect.”
Silver flashed.
A heavy combat knife appeared in his grip, and without a flicker of hesitation he drove the blade into Brody’s thigh above the knee and twisted.
The shriek that followed was animal.
Blood erupted across the dirty snow, shockingly dark, and the copper smell of it hit the freezing air.
Sadie had always known what her boss was.
She had seen the aftermath of his business for three years.
She had never once seen him do it himself.
“This is a message for the Brennans,” Dominic whispered over the sobbing.
“If they come within fifty miles of my business again, I’ll burn their houses down with them inside.”
He pulled the knife free.
“And if anyone ever looks at my woman again — I will take their eyes.”
My woman.
The words hung in the cold, heavy and absolute.
He wiped the blade clean on the man’s expensive coat, nodded to Rourke, and turned.
A single drop of blood marked his white collar.
He crossed the alley to where Sadie stood hyperventilating against the brick — and the monster simply vanished.
In its place stood a man looking at a woman with desperate, consuming focus.
His warm hands framed her face, thumbs sweeping away tears.
“Are you hurt?”
“He grabbed my wrist,” she sobbed.
He looked down at the dark ring already blooming purple on her skin, and fury flared and was forced back down.
“I’m sorry,” she wept, humiliation crashing over her.
“I was stupid.
I thought he actually liked me.
I didn’t know he was a Brennan.”
“Do not apologize,” he commanded softly, stepping into her space, letting his heat reach her freezing skin.
“You are not stupid.
You’re the smartest, most capable woman I have ever known.
The only mistake tonight was mine.”
She blinked up at him, lost.
“Yours?”
“Mine — for letting you believe any other man could have you.
For staying silent three years because I told myself that keeping you behind a desk kept you safe from my world.”
He leaned down, his chest pressing against her.
“You asked this afternoon if the dress was inappropriate.
It was.
Because from the moment you walked in wearing it, all I could think about was tearing it off you.
You are mine, Sadie.
You always have been.”
Then his mouth crashed onto hers — bruising, desperate, utterly possessive, tasting of bourbon and adrenaline.
And for the first time in her life, surrounded by copper blood and freezing rain in the arms of the most dangerous man in Chicago, Sadie did not feel invisible.
She felt like a goddess.
When he finally pulled back, he kept one arm locked around her waist and glanced at the groaning man in the garbage.
“Call the cleaner.
The Brennans get their rat back alive.
Just barely.”
Then he swept her up as if she weighed nothing, carried her to the SUV, and pulled her onto his lap as the doors sealed them in.
She asked into the curve of his neck where they were going.
“Home.
And tomorrow we’re going to have a very long conversation about your new position in this family.”
His penthouse was a two-story fortress of glass and black marble above the Gold Coast.
He carried her straight to the master bath, set her on the edge of the soaking tub, stripped off the ruined shirt — revealing a torso mapped with old knife scars and a puckered bullet wound — and soaked a towel in warm water.
“Give me your hand.”
He pressed the warmth gently to her bruised wrist, jaw ticking as he stared at the mark.
“He will never walk right again,” he said quietly.
“And if old Brennan has a shred of sense, he’ll put his nephew out of his misery before I do.”
Sadie wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly enormous under the pristine bathroom lights, the velvet feeling like a stolen costume.
“I can’t stay here, Dominic.
I have a cat.
A life.
I’m just an assistant.”
He knelt on the marble in his expensive trousers and took both her hands.
“You haven’t been just an assistant since the day you walked into my office.
I watched you handle executives who tried to talk over you.
I watched you organize my chaos.
I watched you hide yourself in those terrible gray sweaters, and it drove me half insane.”
Tears welled again.
“I’m fat, Dominic.
I’m not the kind of woman a man like you parades around.
I’m soft.
I take up too much space.”
“You take up exactly the space you are meant to,” he growled, rising to frame her face.
“I’m surrounded by sharp, starving, artificial people all day long.
You are the only real thing in my life.
Every curve of you is mine to worship — and I will kill any man who makes you feel otherwise.”
He kissed her, deep and reverent, silencing every insecurity.
Then he rested his forehead against hers and ruined it.
“Things change now.
The Brennans want the Canadian routes.
Tomorrow I’m moving you to a secure house in the Hamptons until the war is over.”
Sadie stiffened.
The romantic haze burned away, replaced by sharp clarity, and she pulled her hands free.
“No.”
He blinked, plainly unaccustomed to the word.
“This isn’t a negotiation.
They’ll use you to get to me.
They want the encrypted ledgers.”
“They can’t have them,” she said, the tremor gone from her voice.
“Those ledgers sit behind a polymorphic encryption key that rotates every twelve hours.”
He stared at her.
“How do you know that?
Only my head of cybersecurity knows the protocols.”
“Your head of cybersecurity is an idiot who day-trades crypto on company servers,” she said flatly, standing and smoothing the velvet over her hips.
It was time to pull back the curtain.
“Dominic — who do you think fixes the discrepancies when the manifests don’t match?
Who reroutes the shell funds through the Cayman accounts before the IRS algorithms flag them?
Three years ago your infrastructure was a sieve.
You were bleeding money on the Toronto route because your dispatchers used radio frequencies the feds tapped with ease.
I didn’t just manage your calendar.
I rewrote the routing algorithm.
I built the shadow ledger.
I built the network.”
He breathed out slowly, looking at her as if seeing her for the first time.
“I hold a master’s in applied cryptography from MIT, earned under my mother’s maiden name,” she said, chin high.
“I took a secretary’s job because an espionage scandal at my last firm nearly got me indicted, and I wanted to be invisible.
But your syndicate was so exposed I couldn’t help myself.
I fixed it.
I am the architect of the Canadian routes.”
A slow, terrifying smile spread across his face — not a lover’s smile, but the smile of a king discovering his queen was a dragon.
“You,” he murmured, closing the distance and pulling her against his chest, “are magnificent.”
“I’m not going to the Hamptons,” she said, looking up at him, her heart pounding with a new kind of adrenaline.
“If the Brennans want a war over my network, they’re about to learn why you don’t touch the woman who holds the keys.”
By Tuesday, the city was holding its breath.
The truce was shattered, and Fergus Brennan — an old-school Irish boss who still solved problems with car bombs and baseball bats — wanted blood for his maimed nephew.
But Brennan was cunning.
He knew Dominic’s private army was untouchable in a street fight, so he struck the legitimate front instead.
“They froze our primary accounts,” Dominic said, pacing behind his desk, fury held on a tight leash.
“And two cargo ships are sitting impounded in Montreal on anonymous contraband tips.”
“It’s the alderman,” Rourke grunted from the corner, cleaning a pistol slide.
“Brennan owns Quill.
He’s pulling strings at the Port Authority.
We should pay him a visit tonight.”
“No,” Sadie said sharply, and both killers turned to look at the secretary.
She had traded the velvet for a tailored black blazer, but the invisible woman was gone for good.
“No blood.
Kill an alderman and the FBI swarms this building while the Brennans walk off with the infrastructure.
That’s exactly what Fergus wants.”
Dominic leaned against the desk, arms crossed, watching her with raw admiration.
“Then what’s the play?”
“He’s playing checkers with baseball bats.
We’re going to play chess.”
Her fingers flew across her laptop.
“Quill is corrupt, but mostly he’s greedy.
For two years I’ve run a background subroutine on every politician attached to our permits.
Just housekeeping.”
Rourke chuckled darkly and muttered that he should never get on her bad side.
The wall monitor flooded with spreadsheets, offshore records, and redacted emails.
“He isn’t just taking Brennan bribes.
He’s been embezzling union pension funds through a shell company in Belize.”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed as he read.
“That’s a federal racketeering case.
If this leaks, he dies in a supermax.”
“Exactly,” Sadie said, and a cold smile touched her lips — one she had learned from watching her boss for three years.
“We don’t need to shoot him.
We put the gun on the table and let him pull his own trigger.”
She tapped the keys.
“The dossier just went to his private email through a proxy, with a blind copy queued for the Tribune’s lead investigative reporter.
Sixty-minute timer.
He has thirty minutes to unfreeze the accounts and release the Montreal ships.”
The office sank into suffocating silence while the clock ticked.
Dominic stood behind her chair, hands resting on her shoulders — a silent declaration of whose protection she stood under.
At twenty-four minutes, the encrypted phone rang.
“It’s done,” the alderman’s voice quavered through the speaker, stripped of every ounce of political arrogance.
“The holds are lifted.
The accounts are open.
Please — whoever you have working for you, call them off.
I’m resigning tomorrow.”
Sadie reached over and hit delete, and the timer vanished.
“Have a pleasant retirement, Alderman,” Dominic said coldly, and ended the call.
Rourke let out a low whistle at a war won without a single bullet.
When the enforcer had gone, Dominic spun her chair around and caged her in, hands braced on the armrests.
“You just saved my empire in half an hour.
From a laptop.”
“I protect what’s mine,” she said boldly, gripping his lapels.
“Brennan will know his political shield is gone.
He’ll come straight at us now.”
“Let him come,” she breathed, and pulled him down into a searing kiss.
“We’ll be ready.”
Two nights later, heavy rain battered Caldera Tower while, three stories beneath the street, the server level hummed with frigid mechanical air.
Sadie sat at the center of the racks in a black tactical jacket, fingers dancing across a custom rig, watching red dots multiply on monitoring software she had built from scratch.
“They’re moving.”
Dominic stood behind her in black gear, loading a fresh magazine.
Rourke racked a shotgun by the reinforced door.
Stripped of his political cover and hemorrhaging cash, Fergus Brennan had done exactly what she predicted — he had panicked, mobilizing twelve heavy hitters through the decommissioned maintenance tunnels under the city.
“Three teams of four,” she reported, calm settling over her like armor.
This was her element.
“They’ve breached the sub-basement fire doors with military-grade decryptors.
They think they’re sneaking in.”
“Let them think it,” she said, and triggered the defense protocol she had coded into the building’s own infrastructure.
Power died across three basement levels, replaced by bloody red emergency light.
Elevator shafts locked.
The ventilation in the east corridors dumped freezing air.
On the feeds, mercenaries in night-vision goggles stumbled — prepared for guards, not for a building that fought back.
“Rourke — team one is in the east stairwell.
I’ve dead-bolted the exits.
They’re trapped in a concrete chute.”
The enforcer grinned, chambered a round, and slipped out into the dark like an apex predator in his own territory.
“Team two is brute-forcing the service elevator,” she continued, typing furiously.
“Sloppy.”
She overloaded the panel with a surge that blew the enemy tech off his feet in a shower of sparks.
That left the largest cluster of dots — moving straight for the server room with Fergus Brennan marching at its center.
“Two minutes out.
The door holds against small arms, but they’re carrying breaching charges.”
Dominic, icy calm settling over him, asked whether the uploads were finished.
“Ninety seconds.”
“Then I’ll buy you ninety seconds.”
He kissed the top of her head and took position by the door, weapon raised.
Gunfire thundered from the east stairwell — short, brutal, rhythmic.
Rourke had found his fish in a barrel.
“They’re at the corridor,” Sadie warned.
“Kill the lights.”
The hallway outside went black.
Boots scraped; something heavy slapped against the steel.
“Brace!”
The explosion rocked the floor, ripping the reinforced door off its hinges in a screech of metal and a wall of acrid smoke.
Three mercenaries stormed through — but Dominic was a ghost in the blind spot of the blown door.
Two suppressed rounds dropped the first man.
The second sprayed wild fire into the racks; Dominic closed the gap, forced the rifle skyward, and ended him with the combat knife.
The third swung his sights toward the woman lit by her monitors — and took a thrown blade to the chest before his finger found the trigger.
Through the clearing smoke, Fergus Brennan stepped over his dying men, a heavy revolver leveled at Dominic, silver hair glowing red in the emergency light.
“It’s over, Hale,” he rasped.
His lip curled at Sadie.
“Lost a lot of good men tonight.
But taking your empire and putting a bullet in your fat pig of a secretary makes it worth every one.”
Sadie didn’t cower.
On her screen, the progress bar touched one hundred percent.
She slid out from under the desk and rose to her full height, her silhouette formidable against the red light, and walked to stand shoulder to shoulder with Dominic.
“You haven’t won anything, Fergus,” she said, with a lethal condescension that mirrored her boss perfectly.
“You should check your phone.
I imagine your banker in the Caymans is desperately trying to reach you.”
The cruel smile faltered.
“While you marched your men through a damp tunnel like rats, your tech crew tried to hack my servers,” she explained smoothly.
“They opened a two-way bridge.
A very stupid mistake.
I backtracked it straight into your mainframe in Canaryville — and I took everything.”
She tapped her console, and the wall monitor filled with ledgers wearing his name.
“The Belize accounts: drained.
The Cayman deposits: liquidated through fifty crypto tumblers.
Your real estate: deeded to a domestic-abuse charity under an irrevocable trust.”
“You’re lying,” he whispered, the revolver beginning to shake.
“Our firewalls—”
“Your firewalls were built in 2018.
They were pathetic.”
Another keystroke, and an email filled the screen — addressed to the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago field office, with thousands of attachments.
“Every bribe you paid the alderman.
Every hit you ordered for a decade.
The coordinates of your weapons caches.
Sent five minutes ago.
Your money is gone, your empire is gone, and federal teams are tearing your headquarters apart right now.
You’re a ghost, Fergus.”
The old man’s face drained gray as the ruin of his life crashed down — delivered by the woman he had dismissed as a weak, fat liability.
Screaming that he would kill them both, he swung the trembling revolver up.
A shotgun blast tore through his shoulder before his finger could close, spinning him to the concrete.
Rourke stepped in through the smoke, face spattered, entirely unbothered.
“East stairwell’s clear, boss.
Cops soon.
Feds too, probably.”
“Let them come,” Dominic said, kicking the revolver away and looking down at the weeping wreck of a mob boss with the cold dismissal of a king discarding garbage.
“They’ll find a wanted criminal bleeding in the basement of a legitimate logistics company after a failed burglary.
Our ledgers are clean.
Our hands are clean.”
He turned his back on Brennan’s existence and crossed the room, boots printing faint crimson on the concrete, and pulled Sadie against him.
“A ghost,” he repeated, pride spreading slowly across his face.
“You turned the most feared man on the South Side into a beggar in ten minutes.”
“He insulted my intelligence,” she whispered, arms winding around his neck.
“And he threatened what belongs to me.”
His eyes went dark.
“And what belongs to you?”
“You.
This empire.
All of it.
I’m done hiding, Dominic.
I’m your partner.”
“You are my queen,” he corrected fiercely, and kissed her with a devotion that tasted of victory.
Sadie Kowalski never went back to the oversized cardigans or the quiet title on the door.
She stood beside Dominic Hale in the penthouse above the glittering Gold Coast in tailored silk, a queen surveying undisputed territory.
The war had ended not in street fire but in quiet, lethal keystrokes from a woman the world had fatally underestimated — and the man with his scarred arms wrapped around her ruled the city’s daylight and its shadows with the architect of it all at his side.
True power, it turns out, doesn’t shout from rooftops.
It waits.
It watches.
And it strikes from the shadows.
THE END
Tell us what you think about this story, and share it with your friends. It might inspire them and brighten their day.
If you enjoyed this story, read this one: They Called Her “The Fat Girl No One Wanted” and Buried Her in a Back Office — Until the City’s Most Dangerous Crime Boss Discovered Her Mind Was the Only Thing Standing Between His Empire and Ruin
Disclaimer
This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. If you would like to share your story, please send it to [email protected].
