-album- - Barry White - All Time Greatest Hits - Best Of.rar -

My first thought was a virus. My second thought was my uncle.

The password prompt appeared. I typed Layla —his dog's name. Wrong. 1978 . Wrong. Detroit . Wrong. On a hunch, I typed YouSexyThing . The RAR exploded open.

Leo had died six months ago. He was the kind of man who drove a 1978 Lincoln Continental with velvet seats, who wore gold chains under his flannel shirts, who believed a proper dinner required candlelight and a Marvin Gaye record spinning low. He was also the kind of man who, when he lost his job at the plant, didn't tell anyone for two years. -ALBUM- - BARRY WHITE - All Time Greatest Hits - Best Of.rar

I opened another: 1994-01-22.flac

Inside: forty-seven audio files, all labeled with dates. Not song titles. Dates stretching from August 1983 to February 2024, the month before he died. My first thought was a virus

I sat in my dark apartment until the sun came up. Then I unzipped the remaining files, transferred them to a USB drive, and wrote Elena's name on a piece of tape. My mother would know where to find her.

I went through them like a man possessed. 2001: him singing off-key in a car, his best friend Tom dying of cancer in the passenger seat, both of them laughing. 2009: a eulogy he never delivered at his mother's funeral, recorded alone in his truck afterward, voice breaking. 2016: the sound of rain on a roof, him reading a poem I didn't recognize, something about forgiveness. 2022: "I think I'm going to sell the Continental. I know. I know. But who am I keeping it for?" I typed Layla —his dog's name

A woman's voice, young, laughing. "Leo, if you're recording this, I swear to God—" A man's voice, my uncle's but younger, smoother, full of a swagger I'd never heard in him. "Just talk, baby. Say anything." A sigh. "Okay. It's our one-year anniversary. You said you wanted to remember everything. So here's everything: you burned the spaghetti, I pretended not to notice, we ate it on the floor of your apartment because you don't own a table, and then you played 'Can't Get Enough of Your Love' three times in a row and asked me to marry you." Silence. "I said yes, by the way. In case the recording didn't catch that part."

The recording ended with him humming the first few bars of "Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up." Then silence.

We were cleaning out his basement when I found the external hard drive. Gray, scuffed, a faded sticker that read "BACKUP - DO NOT ERASE" in his blocky handwriting. I'd tossed it in a box of his things and forgotten about it until tonight, when I'd been rummaging for an old charging cable.

The last file: 2024-02-03.flac