Number 21 Nether Oak Close had always been a “lived in” house. Pebbledash, hedges that veered towards straight and neat and then wandered off into “oh well never mind”. Curtained windows that suggested nothing more dramatic than this was a house with reliable kettle and good tea. Carol Quinn liked it that way. Her parents had died six months ago and after the long business of grief, forms filled, rooms emptied, lives reduced to labelled boxes, her home was a pleasant relief.
Her parents’ house had been less cooperative.
They had lived there for forty-three years, long enough for the sediment of decades of stuff to start to compress itself into fossils. It seemed like her parents never quite got the idea of detaching from the things they collected. Carol and her husband Sandy worked methodically, or tried to, but the attic resisted them. It was hot, dust-thick, and strangly smelled faintly of school dinner, floor wax and summers that no longer existed.
That was where they found the tape recorder.
A reel-to-reel, heavier than it looked, its casing dulled to the colour of tired bone. A tape was already mounted, leader thread neatly trimmed, her father’s handwriting on a small square of masking tape:
“For later.”
They took it home without speaking much. Sandy cleaned the heads with care channelling his inner techie nerd. When they finally pressed play, the room filled with hiss, then breath, then laughter, her mother’s laugh, unmistakable, a sound Carol had not realised would illicit a tear quite so quickly.
Then the song began.
Her father’s guitar was steady but unadorned, the way he’d always played. Her mother sang softly at first, as if testing the air. The song was about a walk along a beach, two people setting out at low tide, the sand firm beneath their feet. Understanding came to Carol gradually, if was song but also a metaphor unfolding with the confidence of something that had never needed explanation to the duet.
Young love in bare feet.
Promises shouted into wind.
Hands finding each other without thinking.
The verses moved forward as tides do. Marriage. Children arriving like shells and pebbles in pockets you didn’t remember lifting. Days counted by school terms, nights by worry and hope in equal measure. There was even a verse about letting go, about standing still while others walked on, waving back until they were too small to see.
And then …..
The tape ran out.
No slowing. No farewell chord. Just the abrupt click of absence.
Carol sat very still. Sandy reached for her hand, then thought better of it, then held it anyway.
Over the next few days, she wrote the words down, listening again and again, as if repetition might coax an appropriate ending out of hiding. But the song stopped where it stopped. A life well told, but unfinished.
The missing last verse haunted her.
It should have been about the end of the walk, she thought. About the sea reclaiming the sand. About dusk. About rest. But every line she tried felt false, like borrowing someone else’s handwriting. This was her parents’ song. She had been a subject in it, not its author.
Sandy tried, bless him. He suggested images, sunsets, horizons, footprints washing away, but they sat on the page like polite strangers. Mostly, he helped by making tea and knowing when to say nothing at all.
A week later, there was a knock at the door.
The woman on the step was tall, elegantly put together in a way that suggested age without yelling “OLD!” in your face . She carried an acoustic guitar case, scuffed and loved. Her hair was the colour of autumn honey, her eyes amused and kind.
“Carol Quinn?” she asked.
“Yes?”
She smiled. “I’m Cana Cludhmor. I’ve come about a song.”
Carol felt something shift, not fear, exactly, but recognition without context. As if a chord had been struck somewhere behind her ribs.
They sat at the kitchen table and Sandy boiled the kettle into relevance.
Cana listened without interrupting as Carol played the tape, then told the story. When it ended, she nodded once, decisively.
“You’re looking in the wrong place,” Cana said gently.
Carol frowned. “The melody …. ”
“….is fine,” Cana finished. “It always was. But this song was never about melody. It’s about the harmony.”
She set the guitar on her knee but did not play it.
“Harmony isn’t something you add at the end,” she went on. “It’s something that only exists because more than one voice is present.”
Carol swallowed. “But it’s their life.”
Cana smiled, not unkindly. “And who do you think they were singing to?”
The question landed in Carol’s heart like a hug.
“You’re not outside the song,” Cana said. “You never were. That’s why you can’t finish it from a distance. The last verse isn’t about them walking alone. It’s about what they carried forward and what now carries you.”
They worked slowly. Cana never offered words, only questions. Where did the walk end? (It didn’t.) What did the sea sound like now? (Calmer.) Who was walking beside Carol now, and who would follow later?
When Carol finally sang the last verse, it came out quietly, almost shy. It was about standing at the edge of the water, older now, feeling the same sand, the same pull. About turning back not in loss but in continuation. About understanding that the walk had never been meant to stop, only to change walkers.
The final line did not close the song.
It opened it.
Cana played a Cmaj7 chord, nodded, satisfied. “There,” she said. “A coda. Not an ending. An invitation.”
When Carol looked up, the chair opposite her was empty. The guitar case was gone… that last chord hung in the air like a blown kiss.
That evening, Sandy found Carol at the table, writing music for the first time in her life.
He kissed the top of her head. “Tea?”
“Yes,” she said. Then smiled. “And maybe… harmony.”
Outside, Nether Oak Close settled into itself. Number 21 remained sensible, quiet, unremarkable.
But if you passed by late enough, you might have sworn you heard singing, two voices, joined, walking steadily onward.