Track four from Science & Faith : “For the first time, I’m looking in her eyes…”
His father. The same man who taught him three guitar chords and then disappeared for a pack of smokes—twelve years ago. Leo pulled the earbuds out. His hands were shaking.
“It’s not stealing. It’s… research.” Leo clicked.
He was seventeen again, sitting in his mum’s clapped-out Ford Fiesta, rain hammering the roof. She had just told him his father wasn’t coming back. The radio was playing “Breakeven.” He had cried so hard he didn’t notice the traffic light turn green three times.
Niamh padded in, still in her robe. “Did you sleep?”
He typed: “Title: The Leaver’s Son.”
“No.”
Track seven, the 2012 hidden track: “If you see this man on the street, don’t take his hand…”
That was Aoife. Summer 2011. They had danced on the beach in Howth until the guards told them to leave. She had laughed, and he had promised to write her a song one day. She left for Toronto two months later. He never wrote it.
For the first time in six months, he smiled.
The first piano chord hit him like a bus.
By dawn, he had a verse and a chorus. It was raw. It was off-key in places. But it was his .
The torrent finished at 2:14 AM. 237 files. 1.8 GB. A graveyard of other people’s heartbreaks—and his own.