Todos los capítulos de Become your own flower2: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 6

The fluorescent lights of the mailroom hummed a frequency that felt designed to induce madness. They buzzed, flickered, and cast a sickly green pallor on everything—the gray metal shelves, the stacks of manila envelopes, the floor that had been scrubbed so many times it was smooth as glass. Maya Chen had been standing here for three hours, sorting the interoffice mail for the entire forty-second floor of Sterling Tower, and her back was a knot of dull, persistent pain.She was twenty-two, a graduate of a state school with a degree in economics, and she was the lowest-paid person in a building where the annual bonus of a mid-level executive could have paid off her student loans twice over. She was the invisible woman, the one who held the elevator for people who wouldn't meet her eye, the one who brought coffee to meetings she wasn't invited to, the one whose name no one bothered to learn.Today, she was sorting the mail for the executive suite. The envelopes were thick, cream-colored,

he strategy team occupied the thirty-eighth floor, a sleek, open-plan space filled with glass-walled offices and rows of cubicles that hummed with the soft click of keyboards and the murmur of hushed conversations. It was a world away from the mailroom. Here, people wore expensive suits and talked about billion-dollar deals like they were discussing the weather. Here, the air smelled of coffee and ambition.Maya's new cubicle was small, barely big enough for a desk and a chair, but it was hers. She had a computer, a phone, and a nameplate that read "Maya Chen, Junior Analyst." She stared at it for a long time, running her fingers over the embossed letters. It felt like a dream. She was terrified that she would wake up and find herself back in the mailroom, surrounded by green fluorescent light and the scent of manila envelopes.Her first day was overwhelming. She was introduced to a dozen people whose names she immediately forgot. They were polite but distant, their eyes already movin

The acquisition was her moment.It was a game-changer, a billion-dollar deal that would transform Sterling Industries from a domestic powerhouse into a global player. The target was a German engineering firm called Kraus & Sohn, a family-owned company that had been in operation for over a century. The negotiations were delicate, the competition was fierce, and the stakes were unimaginably high.Eleanor put Maya in charge of the financial modeling. It was a massive responsibility, but Maya thrived under pressure. She worked eighteen-hour days, flying back and forth between New York and Berlin, managing a team of analysts who were all older and more experienced than her. She was the youngest person in the room, the only woman, and the only one without an MBA from an Ivy League school. But she was also the smartest, the hardest working, and the most determined.She anticipated the competitor's moves. She built models that accounted for every variable. She found a way to structure the dea