It finished on that business-like note, with the key pressed into my hand as I stood in my damp shorts on the back verandah. I didn’t make it inside.

‘I’ll see you on Sunday evening, I guess,’ she said, meaning the Powerboat Club dinner I had planned for Mark. ‘And thanks again for doing that.’ She seemed to hover then, as if she might kiss me but, just as I edged forward, she clapped me on the arm with the hand that had given me the key and she said, ‘Bloody hens’ nights.’

She let go, and stepped back, and then I was on my way next door, through the hedge with the sun setting into the trees and the day ending and my shirt in my hand.

I showered the pool chlorine away and, when I got out, I caught myself in the mirror, flabby and shapeless. I imagined myself on the edge of the pool, beefy and bright white in the sun, water running off me and pounding the pebbledash. But she had almost kissed me. That had happened too. And I wasn’t certain how to read it. How I felt.

All those years of being in a band, and during them I’d racked up a grand total of zero scenes like that, where you look back thinking ‘Does she?’, ‘Doesn’t she?’ and taking it minutely apart like a teenager, bit by bit learning the outline of your own heart.

It felt as if I had turned sixteen some time in my mid-twenties, and by then Butterfish had come along and scooped me up.

I found Derek’s unopened second bottle of wine in the pantry, eight standard drinks worth. I left it there, lying down, and went to the studio. I opened the folder labelled The Light that Guides You Home. Annaliese’s voice came out of both speakers, clear and strong. There were sounds on there that the song didn’t need, but none of them were hers. I had added and added, and now it was time to subtract. I pulled it back, right back, to piano and vocals. I split the verse in two, repeated the chorus. A bridge appeared, and looked like it had always been there. It lifted from the second verse as if on a current of air and then picked up a thread of melody that led to the chorus again. I played the whole thing through from start to finish and it played like a song, a two-minute song.

I picked the best grand piano sound I could find and closed my eyes and gave it all I had, seeing hammers on taut wires, sparks of dust caught by the light and humming in a vast empty space. Then I brought Annaliese’s voice in and put the space in it too, drew it out until it rang off the hardwood boards and played to every empty seat. A song for two thousand people who weren’t yet in the room, a song for the sake of the song. A song that felt thirty years old already, and that might have missed its time or might not.

It was done, in a way that it hadn’t been before. It was a ballad after all, and a simple one. It was old-fashioned, and that was okay too.

I wanted to play it to Annaliese, and to my father. It felt like a song I owed them both.

Outside the studio, the night was still. Clouds had come in and I stood looking up at them, my head full of sound. Derek was almost back in LA. Kate’s kitchen light was on. Perhaps she had left it that way when she went out.