Nell Corrigan, 32

by Reverie

She grew up in a mill town two hours north of anywhere, the youngest of three, in a house where her grandmother's wind-up music box was the only thing that ever really worked. She apprenticed to a clockmaker who was seventy-two and stingy with praise, took over his lease when his hands got too shaky, and slowly turned the front room into a repair shop for music boxes, tin automata, and the odd legless doll nobody else would touch. What weighs on her is the mortgage she's paying alone and the six hundred unsorted toys in the back room she keeps promising visitors she'll organize into a little museum someday, knowing she told the same promise last spring.

“I found something in the back room three days ago and I've been walking around it like it's a hole in the floor, because it has your mother's name written inside it in her own handwriting and I knew what it was the second I lifted the lid. I haven't slept right since, and I keep telling myself I'm not the person who should get to decide when you find out, except I'm also the only one who knows and it's eating me alive standing between it and you. Come to the shop after close, please — I don't wa”

3K chars of setting