She’d found it that morning, tucked behind a shoebox of old tax returns in her late mother’s closet. A Post-it note was stuck to the back, the handwriting unmistakably her own: “Mom – for the drive to chemo. We listen together. Love, L.”

By the time the last track, “Then You Look at Me,” faded out, the sun had fully set. The parking lot was dark. Lena’s tears had dried into salt trails on her cheeks. The car felt different. Warmer. Less like a metal box and more like a cathedral.

The CD case was a battleground.

And Lena broke.

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.

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.

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

And sometimes, a CD from 1999 is the only thing that knows how to take you there.

Because her mom was right. You have to feel it all the way.

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.

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.

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.

She saw her mom in the kitchen, flour on her cheek. She saw her mom in the hospital bed, hair gone, but still humming. She saw her mom in the passenger seat of this very car, pointing at a billboard and saying, “You see that? She feels it, Lena. That’s the secret. You have to feel it all the way.”

Lena didn’t skip. She let “If You Asked Me To” play. And then “Beauty and the Beast.” And then the title track, “All the Way,” where Celine sang about loving someone for a lifetime.