It was Daniel’s song. The one he hummed at the dinner table, in the back seat of the car, while doing the washing up late at night. The one she had heard so constantly in the first year of grief that she couldn’t bear it on the radio. She sat with her eyes shut and listened to Owen hum it. The garden held completely still.
When she opened her eyes, he had stopped. He was watching her with an expression she recognised—the particular quiet of a person who has been trying to communicate something true for a very long time and has finally, somehow, been understood. He held out the envelope again. “I think,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “that you might be ready for this now.”