I sit down in the Adirondack chair beside her. The fire crackles between us and the night. Somewhere in the distance, the ocean murmurs against the shore.
“Mom made hot chocolate,” Delilah says.
“I noticed.” I hold up my mug. “Cinnamon?”
“Her secret ingredient. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell?”
“In this town? Everyone, eventually.”
We laugh and some of the tension bleeds out of the air.
“So,” I say, looking at the tape in her hands. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She holds it up. The label is faded but still legible:For Delilah. My seventeen-year-old handwriting, cramped and earnest. “I’ve been staring at it all day. Part of me wants to listen, and part of me is terrified.”
“Why terrified?”
“Because it’s the real you.Before everything went wrong and I ruined it.” She traces the edge of the label with her finger. “What if it makes me realize how much we lost?”
“What if it makes you realize we can get it back?”
She looks at me. The firelight dances in her eyes.
“Only one way to find out,” she says.
She puts the tape in the boom box. Her finger hovers over the play button.
“Ready?” she asks.
No. Not even close. I recorded that tape in my bedroom closet with the door shut so Dad wouldn’t hear. I remember the carpet under my knees, the way my voice kept cracking, the three false starts before I got through the first verse without stopping. I was so sure she’d laugh. So sure the words were too big for a kid who still couldn’t parallel park. I poured every honest thing I had into that tape and then buried it in the ground because handing it to her directly felt like handing her a loaded weapon.
And now she’s about to press play, and I’m going to hear who I was before the industry taught me to polish everything until the fingerprints disappeared. Before I learned that vulnerability is a brand and not just a risk. Before twenty years of practice made mebetter at hiding the exact thing that tape has no idea how to hide.
I’m not ready. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to sit next to her and listen to the version of me that loved her without any armor on.
“I’m ready,” I say.
She presses play.
Static. A crackle. Then my voice—young and rough and so nervous it makes my chest ache.
“Okay. So. This is probably stupid.”
Delilah’s breath catches.
“But you’re leaving tomorrow, and I wanted to give you something to remember me by. I’m not good at talking about feelings—shocker, I know—so I figured I’d try singing them instead. Don’t laugh. I’m serious. If you laugh, I’ll know, and I’ll be humiliated across whatever distance ends up between us.”
She’s smiling now. A real smile, even though her eyes are wet.
“Anyway. Here goes nothing.”
A guitar starts. Clumsy chords, uncertain rhythm. I was still learning to play properly back then, and it shows. But the melody is there. The bones of something real.
And then seventeen-year-old me starts to sing.
I’ve been writing songs since before I could drive
