PERKY

1

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I hope you enjoy the new chapter! If you like it, please let me know! 

3 years 3 days later

Towards evening the workshop was now as quiet as the desert. It was an annoying moment when I can see the dust floating in the air.. It was as if I was stuck in a dull yellowish moment whose pixels became clear.

We kept working, knowing that it was our last days. I used to wait until the last minute every day, lock the workshop and leave. It's like I didn't  want it to end, whereas I was preparing to leave voluntarily at the end of this year.

I was only sixteen when I started working here. I was saying goodbye to my childhood, the hardest days of my life. However, it was not difficult to say goodbye to those days. I would erase all memories if I could.

Except for my days here. This place gave me a breather. I learned from his lawyer that my boss Hubert Archambeau, aka Monsieur G whom I had worked for for eight years, a father and mother to me died a few weeks after the disappearance of him.

Losing your life... I was trying to hold my pinky finger on the edge of the cliff so that my life would not be lost.

He left without saying goodbye, and he didn't even let me say goodbye. He was secretive enough to hide his grave. So maybe when I came to the workshop, I felt like I was in a grave.

He left me some handkerchiefs, eight years of souvenirs, and a house.

A house.

It was a  too generous gift for someone who rolled their eyes at me all the time.

A house.

Every year before blowing out the candles, I always wish the same. To be myself. To get rid of my aunt's patronage. Because patronage was unacceptable and I had to live for a long time.

Even though college was a getaway, I was back. Everything was continuing where it left off.

I had two specific scenarios in front of me. There is also a house.

Either I get married and leave that house, or I live with my aunt and her husband who can be really narrow-minded.

Although I do not want to be ungrateful, someone who knows that I am longing for the second option, but the bitter truth is my financial problems will not allow it for a while.. He left me a house and passed away from this world.

As I looked into his room as if I could visualize his presence before my eyes and get an answer from him, I took at look at the flowerpot behind the glass.

Having worked with  Monsieur G for eight years, if you paid close attention to something, I would know that he wanted it.

He knew how to get into people's minds, how to influence and control their lives.

I believed that one day I would find out what he was hiding, but since he disappeared, I had not touched the flower pot when I entered his room. As if he could come out at any moment...

I went to his room and turned on the light. I smelled the succulent.

I didn't even know what I was looking for, but a tear fell from my eye as my hand hit the foreign matter between the ivy roots.

I examined the small key I was holding between my fingers as I shook the dirt off my hand. I'd never seen it before.

I knelt in front of the bookcase behind his desk and pulled one of my hairpins out. After opening the lock, I pulled the door of the closet I hadn't seen in years. There was a tin can. I took it out and leaned my back against the locker, then looked at the lock. It was small like the key he kept in his flower pot.