LEADEN

IT'S OVER

When my father ignored all my years of hard work and effort, mockingly offering me the position of assistant to my brother, I decided to join the competing company that had offered me a job. After I joined, my new company’s name gained recognition, international affiliates expanded, and we were constantly invited as guests of honor to trade shows, cultural embassies, and consulate events. In fact, invitations for VIP events had become quite frequent lately. I shook my father’s company’s market position in just five years. Atatürk was so right in saying, “A society that holds its women back is doomed to fail.” My father was finally paying the price for what he had done to his own daughter.

He even started to incur losses. Our legacy began to suffer, but it was all my father’s fault. It wasn’t deteriorating because I wasn’t qualified enough, after all, but only because he gave important positions to my incompetent brothers just because they were men. So, there was nothing left for me to do.

Years later, when I was offered a junior partnership at the group I worked with, my father also extended an offer to bring me back. He said he wanted me to start as the CFO. Since he was my father, and it was our family business, and I missed the warmth of the home where I was born and raised, I forgave him and agreed to return to the company.

During that time, Yusuf and I decided to get married. My father wasn’t happy about it at all. He insisted Yusuf was not suitable for me. He even threatened that he would not employ me in his company if I married Yusuf. He openly expressed his disapproval of Yusuf, believing he would try to claim rights in the holding company through me.

I called my father’s bluff and accepted the junior partnership offer from the company I worked for. That was when I went to Yusuf simply as Naz. Without my father’s name, reputation, or support—not as Naz Ebruli, heiress of the Ebrulis—but as Yusuf’s Naz.

If I had relied on my father’s wealth and hadn’t worked, I either would have had to call off the wedding or surrendered completely to Yusuf, without any financial security. My love had blinded me to that extent, causing me to give up so much of myself. Who knows, perhaps he’d treated me so roughly and disrespectfully because he saw and knew that my father could discard me so easily.

Even though my father had wronged me so much, it wasn‘t worth calling his bluff and leaving him behind for Yusuf. He was my father, after all; and even though he had taken a step towards me when his business was in trouble, he had offered us an opportunity—a chance to be a family again—as we used to be. Ironically, at that time, I was more eager to build my own family with Yusuf.

I looked at Yusuf, my disappointment plain. *What a disgrace,* I thought. The tears streaming down my face were purely from sadness. I was grieving for the time I had wasted, my efforts, the value I had given in vain, my love—in short, for myself. I couldn’t endure this upstart, jealous, ill-tempered man any longer.

“I have one last thing to throw,” I said in a remarkably calm voice.

Those who know, know that when a woman speaks in a calm tone, regardless of what she says, it means she has settled things in her mind, killed them within herself. But Yusuf wasn’t even aware of himself; how could he know this? He kept speaking to me so carelessly.

“Throw one more thing; let’s see if I don’t throw you from the garden into the waters of the Bosphorus!”

A bitter smile was my only response. I never took my eyes off his as I removed the ring from my finger and threw it at him.

“It’s over!” I said. “I’m divorcing you!”