EL TIEMPO JUSTO (THE RIGHT TIME)

PROLOGUE

20 years have passed and she's still there, her soul might have passed away but the story she had made still remains present. Two decades and her family still couldn't believe their loss until someone was born, a person who got the resemblance of her, the traces of her existence stands with her.

A silhouette of a woman stands in front of a simple and almost turned down house, checking it slowly thinking why it seems to attract her, a pull of attraction who's pulling her to come inside and look for something she did not even know.

"Irene!" A baritone voice of an old man echoes from the porch. "Are you just planning to stand there and look at the house?" He asked as he waited for her daughter to come inside. The woman on the other hand, abruptly shrugged her thought and followed her father.

"Why do we really have to come in here despite the house's situation?" She asked looking at her father who started to get the box and put the things he needed to get. "We can just ask some of the workers to get something and bring it to us, you also have a meeting with the Kim's tonight and so am I." She said in her usual voice.

Her father did not answer, instead he instructed her to get her grandmother's things upstairs and handed her a bag. "Get everything and put it in this bag, don't leave any traces." He said. The woman couldn't do anything but to follow her father's command.

She glided upstairs, remembering the times were she had spent her childhood listening to her grandfather's story about his sister who died. As she can remember, the old woman had spent a quite long time inside a mental hospital not until her great grandparents had decided to withdraw her out of the facility as she started to get weaker and weaker each day until one day, the woman died peacefully in her bed, sleeping.

It seems to be so tragic but she knew her grandmother was full of wonders. She was five when she had first heard about her, her grandfather used to tell how intelligent her sister was and how beautiful it is which the old man also used to say that her beauty doesn't seem to belong to her parents, that it came from her sister. Irene considered it as a compliment before but she found it weird when she remembered how her grandmother used to spend in a mental facility and sometimes made her wonder if her grandfather might have thought she's crazy.

Ouch!" Irene groaned as she hurt her head on the hanging ledge of a shelf, as she eased herself from the pain she started walking inside and started to gather some picture frames and books in front of a vanity table. When a black untitled book caught her attention.

Without any second thoughts, Irene gets it and starts to read the first page.

"Would it be too weird if someone just suddenly crosses your dream? She felt surreal but I know I wouldn't be able to touch her, from the moment I heard her voice I know I'm gone crazy, she took me by the wind and I'm just a leaf who's willing to go with her flow."

"A she?"

"I was hoping to see her again but I wouldn't know how."

The woman had kept on reading until. "Irene! We better get going, it's getting dark!" Her father shouted from downstairs, the woman rushed to get all of the things she could have thought that belonged to her grandmother and put it inside the bag.

"Did you get all the things there?" His father asked as he unfolded the tonneau of his pick-up truck, the woman helped the older to put all the black bags there when he started to talk again. "You know what, there is something on you that I really tried to avoid remembering." He said as he handed his hands towards her daughter. Meanwhile, Irene found it kinda intriguing as she thought that her father had never tried to open some things towards her, not even the personal life he had experienced before.

"Before you tell me that, can I have this?" She raised the notebook and a piece of an old sketchbook from the bag. The woman might never get to experience a close bond to her father as he was busy with things he had built in the business industry but Irene just thought that she was lucky enough that there is a man who had a mind to think that she was still his daughter, a piece and part of himself.

But that doesn't mean she likes his father.

"Sure." Irene nodded and went to the front seat of the car. Without any words, the two started to drive back to the city, almost letting the car fly up to the skies as the two have their own scheduled business meetings.

Stuck in the traffic, her father started to talk once again. "I really hate it when I go back to that house." He said as he watched his daughter's reaction from the side of his eye. The woman had her eyes looking at the busy cars just not to seem to bother her father's presence on her side, but her ears were listening, her father had known about that.

"My father's sister was sent to the hospital when she was just around your age, she's a type of a healthy woman who had a strong belief to herself, at the age of 21, she decided to drop out herself from college, she was taking a pre-law course at that time as she believed that she wanted to stand herself together with the other female classmates she had for this country but she ended up losing her mind."

The man had stopped from talking when Irene remembered the woman that her grandmother was pertaining on her diary. "They asked her why and she told them that she was just tired and just wanted to have some rest but as the days flew by, she had gotten worst, she couldn't even do the simple task she was asked to do, most of the time she will just sit there and started to talk to herself, until they found out that she got into a maladaptive daydreaming that later on fell into a mental illness called schizophrenia. Day by day, my father's parents took care of her as they don't want him to be with her most of time, they've believed that he's the only one who can put their family's business into a success at that time until one day he arrived and found out that she had almost stab their father."

"He could have just suggested it to their parents to bring her to the metal institution, she could have been healed and live a life normally." Irene said, her grandmother whom she had only heard by the stories of his grandfather was a type of story that a sympathy should never be laid.

She might have been considered as a heartless person, but she just doesn't want to show a lot of emotions in front of everyone, especially to her father whom she considered as a type of an emotionally freaked out mammal. She doesn't seem to like people crying in front of her.

"I heard that Wendy had gone on a business trip to Toronto, is there something you wanted me to tell you?" Irene asked, diverting the topic of her grandmother's history. "She said, our company and theirs will start to have their expansions on Canada by mid-April, is there a need for me to go there, I mean, Son's child was already sent there, will I be the representative of our company or you're just going there with the other investors." Irene had her eyes set on the business industry since then, after she had graduated on college, she abruptly got to work on their family's company and was considered the vampire among their empire as she could have just looked at someone and let them lose in one glance, and also, despite of her age being caught up by the calendars, she had remained young and beautiful that every man around her had drooled over her feet.

But the woman doesn't know whether to understand their usual perverted state or she would just continue keeping up with business and her calendars. Because she thinks that men are just pure assholes and less than half of the world's population, there will be only -1% of chances that she could have found someone who truly fits for her own standard.

"You don't have to worry about the business ventures with the Son's, your mother will be taking care of it." The man stopped the car in front of the Velvet Fragrance, the woman was about to open the door when her father started to talk again.

This time, her rage towards her father came back. "If you have time, Mrs. Kim wanted to introduce you to their family. Drop a call to her sooner or later, Jisoo wanted to meet y-" Irene slammed the door right in front of his face and started to march inside her company.

"Fuck, I hate this life."