Way Cd — Celine Dion All The

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

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

She slid the CD out of its tray. It was flawless. No scratches. She turned it over, watching the rainbow sheen of the data layer catch the weak winter sunlight. It felt heavier than it should. It wasn’t just a polycarbonate disc; it was a decade of her mother’s life, compressed into 73 minutes and 18 seconds of laser-read pits and lands. celine dion all the way cd

Lena’s thumb traced the tracklist. All the Way. It’s All Coming Back to Me Now. Each title was a door to a room she wasn’t ready to enter.

And Lena broke.

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…”

The CD case was a battleground.

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.