Even now, trudging through thin sheets of snow toward Crowdwell’s, he played out this debate in his mind. Though he didn’t work there anymore in any official capacity, Nan still called him for the occasional repair, and today, he’d been taken away from browsing through websites for London universities by a couple of broken lightbulbs. But he hadn’t been steered from thinking about Sam, not when every window on the High Street was plastered with tabloids bearing her face. Thoughts of her followed him all the way, nagging him with indecision, with want, with uncertainty. By the time he actually reached Crowdwell’s, his skull throbbed with the beginnings of a headache and he wished he’d just sent over a handyman to take a look at the stupid lightbulbs. At least in the safety of his own house, he didn’t have to see Sam everywhere.
Using his spare key, Daniel let himself into the shop, which bore an unusualCLOSEDsign. Nan had opened once during a blizzard, but today she’d let a few burned-out bulbs stop her? The hairs on the back of his neck rose.
“Nan?” Stepping into Crowdwell’s and closing the door behind him, he blinked as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Total darkness. Not a single light in the entire shop was illuminated. He flipped the light switch just by the door, but still, no light. “Nan, areallthe lights out? Hello?”
Nan didn’t answer him. No one answered him. Not verbally, at least. Plunged in darkness, he couldn’t see the response, but he heard it. A single chord struck on a piano reverberated through the air, and a voice—unsteady and shaking, raw and afraid, full of ardor and yearning, the one voice who swore a million times she would never be caught dead doing this—began singing, tentative piano chords humming underneath her song. He recognized the voice. He’d only heard it sung once, but it wasn’t a memory anyone would have forgotten. Last time, it was singing the Beatles. Now?
“Oh, Danny Boy…”
His breath hardened to lead in his throat. The song, the voice… He blinked through the darkness, but he couldn’t see anything. There was nothing but the voice, the sound, and his own beating heart. That traditional melody he’d always loved moved through the darkness, wrapping him up in a melodic embrace.
“The pipes, the pipes are calling.
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer’s gone and all the leaves are falling.
It’s you, it’s you must go, and I must bide…”
In the lull of the verse, another voice, a male voice, called out. “One, two, three, four!”
The darkness of the room shattered as a series of shoddily hooked up lamps and the heaven of fairy lights above him turned on, revealing a whole new world of his bookshop. It was like being drenched in gold. There, in the front, stood a huge grand piano, hastily squished between two bookshelves. Around the piano stood his friends, his neighbors, his jam partners and bookshop customers, all holding some kind of instrument. Whether it was Angie wailing on her found-again trumpet or Freddie pounding on a makeshift drum kit, they all played along in perfect time, shaping the grooves and slides of the song, carrying Daniel alone with the tune.
And there, behind the piano, sat Samantha, singing into a propped-up microphone and focusing on the keys like her life depended on it. The golden light from the fairy lights danced upon her skin and hit the corners of her hesitant smile.
He had seen her in ball gowns and in the light of the full moon, dolled up to the nines and drenched in autumn rain. This was the most beautiful she’d ever been.
The song, too, exploded, breaking from the traditional Irish ballad form into some sort of swing number, a real dance tune that brought him jiving back to their date at the Blitz Ball. It was a musical party, a parade of bright faces and carefree music.
It was an apology. And a love letter. And a celebration of everything that had been good and could be good again.
“But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow.
And when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow.”
He stood in the back of the shop, not daring to go any closer to them for fear he would lose himself and fall into her arms.
“Oh, Danny Boy, Oh, Danny Boy…” With brave, uncertain eyes, she met Daniel’s unflinching gaze and finished the musical line with an unfaltering truth. A truth so precious and so dangerous and so, so impossible to deny. “I love you so.”
She bent back low over the keys, like Schroeder in those old Charlie Brown cartoons, her chest heaving for breath as the cobbled-together brass section wailed in a musical interlude, covering the quiet sins of her flawed, heartfelt piano pounding.
“But come ye back when all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead and dead I well may be,
Then you shall find the place where I am lying,
And you shall sing an avé there for me.”
His store was filled with light and hope and music again. A love song replaced the air. Magic hung from the ceiling, so close he could pluck it down and hold it to his chest.
In the musical rush, his mind and his heart took up arms and began battle once more. His heart wanted to soar and join her. His head kept him rooted to the spot. But his memory proved his heart’s unlikely ally.
I don’t want to do anything I’m not comfortable with, he once heard her say.I don’t want to make a fool of myself. Yet, there she was, fighting through the notes of a piano score she clearly had only just begun to learn, singing which she was deathly afraid of, and indulging in music in public, something she swore she’d never do again, something he knew she absolutelyhated.
“And I will hear tho’ soft you tread above me.
