Celine Dion All The Way Cd 〈ORIGINAL – Honest Review〉

The first track was “The Power of Love.” Lena remembered her mom singing it off-key while making meatloaf, using a wooden spoon as a microphone. The second track was “If You Asked Me To.” That was the song playing when her mom got the call that the cancer was in remission, the first time. And then the third track… “Beauty and the Beast.” That was the lullaby.

Not a dramatic sob, but a quiet, leaking sort of cry. The kind that comes from a place you didn’t know had a faucet. Celine’s voice soared, impossibly clear, impossibly huge. “’Cause I’m your lady, and you are my man…”

She didn’t reply. Instead, she popped open the Civic’s dusty CD player—the one she refused to rip out even though the car had Bluetooth—and slid the disc in.

The player whirred. A quiet hiss of silence. Then, the first piano chords of “The Power of Love” filled the car. celine dion all the way cd

The song ended. A moment of silence. Then the tick of the laser moving to the next track.

It sat on the passenger seat of Lena’s beat-up Honda Civic, a beacon of 1999 plastic and nostalgia. The cover was a close-up of Celine Dion herself, her expression a mix of serene power and quiet vulnerability. The title, All the Way... A Decade of Song , was scrawled in elegant gold letters. To anyone else, it was a greatest-hits album. To Lena, it was a time bomb.

The CD case was a battleground.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her dad: “You okay, kid? You don’t have to do it all today.”

Now, she was twenty-six, sitting in a parking lot outside the storage unit facility where she was supposed to be clearing out the last of her mother’s things. The Civic’s engine hummed, the heater blasting against the December chill. She picked up the jewel case. The plastic had a few hairline cracks. The booklet inside was probably still pristine.

She didn’t put the CD back in its case. She left it in the player, turned the key, and drove toward the storage unit. She wasn’t going to clear it out today. But she was going to listen to the CD one more time on the drive there. And one more time on the way back. The first track was “The Power of Love

The date on the Post-it was from five years ago. Her mother had lost her battle three months after that note was written.

Lena had never listened to the CD. She couldn’t.