It had seemed so ordinary, almost pedestrian at the time. If only she could have stopped herself from sliding into the driver’s seat and glancing at him so briefly, before backing her car out onto the road. She was so focused on the road ahead of her, the life in front of her, that she didn’t stop and absorb that final image of him standing in his driveway. It had been her biggest regret.

Seeing her father tonight made her nostalgic for a Dangerous Tendencies album. Normally, she didn’t play Jason’s records—his music was saved for his own show—but “The One I Left Behind” was her favorite of their songs. Sliding Tending, the band’s debut album, out of its battered paper sleeve, Lara placed it on the turntable, flipped the knob to the CUE setting, and then carefully set the needle on the vinyl groove for song number three. As she wound the disk backward, something odd happened. She picked up tones. Is it a song? It was definitely a song. Usually, the backward cue sound was pure garble that resembled a warped tape, but tonight she heard the beginnings of a perfect guitar intro.

That was impossible.

“I am definitely hearing things.” She inhaled loudly and restarted the record until she heard the song start and positioned her hands on the record, stopping her fingers. Finding the start spot, she swallowed hard then wound her hand backward. Again, instead of dissonance, soft guitar chords echoed through the cue in the sound booth. She kept the rotation going steady, standing up so she could get a good angle above the turntable. Finally, after thirty seconds of winding, she heard a man’s voice begin to sing.

You said I didn’t know what I wanted,

That I didn’t know about love.

“What the fuck?” Her hand froze. She stepped back from the turntable.

Moving quickly, she flipped the switch on the reel-to-reel tapes. The station could run on the four tape machines passing off songs to each other as if on autopilot, so she wouldn’t have to worry about the sound board for now.

She pushed through the booth and out into the office, searching through drawers for a tape recorder. She found the one she was looking for, but when she hit the PLAY button it was dead. Finally, she grabbed Jason’s guitar and ran back into the booth. Cuing up the record again, she repeated the process. The song was still there. She located the notes on the guitar and played the melody, repeating the record rotation until she had it. The song wasn’t familiar. She tabbed the notes quickly on a piece of scrap paper so she wouldn’t lose them.

As she heard the door open for the overnight person to relieve her, she tried the record once again. This time the familiar warble had replaced the guitar opening.

The song was gone.