The applause nearly scared him back behind the curtain.
He found us in the crowd.
Then he found Mrs. Parker.
She smiled.
He breathed.
The piano began.
Four familiar notes.
The melody from Halloween.
Only now it continued.
Violins joined.
Then clarinets.
The music widened, carrying the simple theme into something larger.
Owen stepped toward the microphone.
His first line trembled.
The second steadied.
By the third, he had forgotten to be afraid.
He had written about roads.
Not literal ones.
The invisible roads people leave in one another.
A teacher remembered decades after a classroom emptied.
A song crossing half a century.
A kindness whose consequences remained unknown to the person who gave it.
A goodbye that did not erase what came before.
Mrs. Parker cried quietly.
So did Daniel.
At the final verse, the children’s choir joined Owen.
Their voices rose together.
And for the first time, Mrs. Parker heard Thomas Mercer’s song exactly as he had eventually imagined it.
