Adele laughed, a dry, sharp sound in her empty Vancouver apartment. No crackle. They had scrubbed her soul clean. She clicked play.

She pulled the hard drive out, a clunky black brick from a past life. Her son, Marcus, had bought it for her. “Mom, no more vinyl for the road. Digital. Clean.” She had scoffed then, the same way her father had scoffed at cassettes. Now, she plugged it into the laptop Marcus had also bought her, the silver machine humming like an impatient teenager.

She had hated it.