conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Manchester, Cheshire, Sleep with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Women's Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'The Man Who Risked It All'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Man Who Risked It All
  I arrived at 13 minutes before the key moment. I sat down on the bench on the other side of the avenue, my plastic bag next to me. The area was deserted. In the heart of summer, most of its inhabitants were far away on vacation, no doubt. I was trying hard to take deep breaths to relax.
  The façade of the mansion was dark. The weak light from the nearest streetlight gave it a gloomy air. A haunted castle. Only the windows of the great drawing room were lit up.
  At 9:52, I got up. Eight minutes to go. With a knot in my stomach, I started crossing the avenue diagonally, taking my time. I needed to stay close to the door, without seeming to be on the lookout if a neighbor saw me.
  A lady with a little dog on a leash appeared on the sidewalk across the street. At a distance, I could see the end of her cigarette weaving circles in the darkness. Her companion, a wheezy Pekinese, followed her very slowly, stopping every few inches to sniff something, his long hair sweeping the ground. Every time he stopped, the woman took a drag on her cigarette and waited patiently for the dog to finish delighting in the smell it had detected.
  I was thinking my leg of lamb would smell even worse the next day when I recognized the humming of a motor. As the bus stopped, a miracle happened. The lady picked up the dog and started running for the bus. The peke's head nodded like those plastic bobblehead dogs that people used to put on the back shelves of their cars in the 1970s. The woman made it to the bus in time and got on. The doors closed behind her, and the bus pulled away.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me two more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A jazz tune on the saxophone played while I waited for the operator to come back on the line. I began to wonder if I hadn't been forgotten.
  Half an hour later, his wife passed me on to Verger, but not before she'd advised me to be brief in order not to encroach on his naptime.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Then Audrey and I crossed our fingers and called Madame Blanchard. We leapt with joy when she confided that she still had not rented my old apartment, suspecting the different candidates she had interviewed of being potentially noisy neighbors!
  We took possession of the apartment again one fine Saturday in April, taking with us just what we needed to be happy. The boxes had barely been set down, when Audrey opened the windows wide and put crumbs on the sills. The radiant sun filled the whole apartment, and the Parisian sparrows were soon accompanying our move with their joyful cheeping.
  That very evening, Madame Blanchard organized a get-together in the courtyard to celebrate our return. Something had changed in her, but I couldn't identify what. She put a big white tablecloth on an old table and laid out a variety of quiches and cakes that she had spent all day making, perfuming the building with tempting smells. She invited all the neighbors, who were happy to take advantage of the mildness of one of the first spring evenings, and to my surprise, she went and fetched Étienne. He stuffed himself and appropriated a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage that he hung on to all evening. An old battery-driven cassette player gave out slightly old-fashioned but very joyful French songs that we wiggled to as we laughed. Carefreeness and lightness were back.
  Several times during the evening, I looked at Madame Blanchard as I tried to figure out what had changed. It was nearly midnight when suddenly the answer came to me, perfectly obvious: She had abandoned black and put on a pretty flowered dress. The biggest things are sometimes the ones that go unnoticed the most.
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conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Be the first to know about Hay House's dollar deals, free downloads, special offers, affirmation cards, giveaways, contests and more!. We leapt with joy when she confided that she still had not rented my old apartment, suspecting the different candidates she had interviewed of being potentially noisy neighbors!
  We took possession of the apartment again one fine Saturday in April, taking with us just what we needed to be happy. The boxes had barely been set down, when Audrey opened the windows wide and put crumbs on the sills. The radiant sun filled the whole apartment, and the Parisian sparrows were soon accompanying our move with their joyful cheeping.
  That very evening, Madame Blanchard organized a get-together in the courtyard to celebrate our return. Something had changed in her, but I couldn't identify what. She put a big white tablecloth on an old table and laid out a variety of quiches and cakes that she had spent all day making, perfuming the building with tempting smells. She invited all the neighbors, who were happy to take advantage of the mildness of one of the first spring evenings, and to my surprise, she went and fetched Étienne. He stuffed himself and appropriated a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage that he hung on to all evening. An old battery-driven cassette player gave out slightly old-fashioned but very joyful French songs that we wiggled to as we laughed. Carefreeness and lightness were back.
  Several times during the evening, I looked at Madame Blanchard as I tried to figure out what had changed. It was nearly midnight when suddenly the answer came to me, perfectly obvious: She had abandoned black and put on a pretty flowered dress. The biggest things are sometimes the ones that go unnoticed the most.Then Audrey and I crossed our fingers and called Madame Blanchard.