The Anniversary Playlist – Part 1

The envelope was taped to the coffee machine, which was the one place Pieter looked every single morning without fail.

Open at 7 p.m. Not before. I will know. — E.

He held it up to the window of the houseboat to see through it. Nothing. Just a folded piece of paper and something small and hard inside. Outside, the canal was grey and still, a cyclist ringing a bell on the bridge, a heron standing on the roof of the next boat like a tiny, judgmental old man.

Ten years. Today was ten years.

He put the envelope in his jacket and went to work and thought about it for nine hours.

---

At 7 p.m. exactly, he opened it at the kitchen table.

Inside was a USB stick shaped like a tulip and a card in Emma’s handwriting.

Ten years. Ten songs. One for every year.

Each song comes with a memory and a dare. You play the song. You remember. You do the dare. No skipping.

If any dare feels wrong, say “tulip” and we skip it, no questions.

I’m on the roof. Bring wine.

Pieter laughed out loud in the empty kitchen.

He plugged the tulip into the old speaker by the window. The first song started. A cheap, terrible Dutch pop song from 2016. He groaned. He knew it immediately. It had been playing in the bar in De Pijp the night he spilled an entire beer on a stranger and she had laughed instead of shouting.

The card said: Song 1. You spilled beer on me. Dare: come up and say the first thing you said to me.

He grabbed two glasses and a bottle and climbed the narrow ladder to the roof.

Emma was sitting on a blanket among the potted plants, wrapped in a big wool cardigan, string lights glowing above her. Her red hair was loose. She was smiling like she had been waiting all day.

Pieter cleared his throat.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, exactly as he had ten years ago. “Can I buy you a beer? I’ll try to keep this one in the glass.”

Emma burst out laughing.

“That was terrible then,” she said, “and it’s terrible now.”

“It worked, though.”

“It worked,” she agreed, and held out her glass.

---

Song two was the one from their first holiday in Portugal, when the car broke down and they slept on the beach. Dare: tell me one thing you’ve never told me about that night.

He told her he’d been awake all night, watching her sleep, terrified because he already knew.

“Knew what?” she asked.

“That I was going to marry you.”

Emma went very quiet.

Song three was the song from their wedding. Dare: dance with me. Here. On the roof. Badly. They danced among the flowerpots, terribly, and a man walking his dog on the canal path below stopped to watch and then, to their delight, applauded.

Song four was from the hard year, the year her father was sick. Dare: hold my hand for the whole song and don’t say anything. He held her hand. Neither of them spoke. When it ended, they were both crying a little, and it was fine.

Song five was from the night they bought the houseboat, with no money, in the rain. Dare: kiss me like you did when the bank said yes.

He did. It lasted longer than the song.

---

By song seven, the sun had gone down. The canal had turned black and gold with reflections. The wine bottle was empty.

Song seven was slow and smoky, a jazz song he didn’t recognise.

“I don’t know this one,” he said.

“You wouldn’t,” Emma said quietly. “It’s for year seven. When we got so busy we forgot each other.”

He went still. Year seven had been bad. Both of them working late. Eating dinner in front of laptops. Days without a real conversation.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“So am I.” She picked up the card. “Dare: tell me one thing you want, that you’ve never asked me for.”

Pieter looked at her for a long time.

“Honestly?” he said.

“That’s the whole point.”

So he told her. Quietly, his face hot, things he had wanted for years and never said because he’d been worried she would laugh or be hurt. She didn’t laugh. She listened with her head tilted, the way she listened to the radio when a good song came on.

When he finished, she put the card down.

“My turn,” she said. And told him hers.

The song ended. Neither of them noticed.

---

Song eight, nine and ten they didn’t play on the roof.

They took the speaker downstairs to the small bedroom at the front of the boat, where a round window looked out at the water and the lights of the bridge. Emma lit two candles. The boat rocked very gently as a late tourist boat went by.

“Song eight,” Emma said, reading the card by candlelight. “Dare: the first thing you told me on the roof. The thing you never asked for.” She looked up at him. “Ask me.”

He asked her.

She smiled slowly. “Yes.”

What happened next belonged only to them: to the candlelight and the round window and the soft sound of the canal against the hull, to ten years of knowing someone and the astonishing discovery that there was still more to know. They were not shy anymore. They had said everything out loud, and saying it had made them brave.

At some point, song ten began to play. Neither of them could have said which song it was.

---

Much later, wrapped in the duvet with her head on his chest, Emma reached over and turned the speaker off.

“You didn’t read the last card,” she said.

“There’s a last card?”

She handed it to him. On the back of the tenth card, in her handwriting:

Song 11 is not on the stick. You choose it. You make the next ten.

Pieter read it twice. Then he looked down at her, warm and sleepy and smiling in the candlelight.

“That’s a lot of pressure,” he said.

“You spilled beer on me,” Emma said. “You owe me.”

He laughed, and kissed her hair, and in the morning he taped a new envelope to the coffee machine.

Song 11. Tonight. 7 p.m. Bring nothing. — P.

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Next: Part 2, Song Eleven. Pieter’s turn to plan the night, and he has been practising.