The Anniversary Playlist – Part 2: Song Eleven
Wife & Couples·EN·4 min read·Published 2026-10-29, updated 2026-10-29·Part 2 of 2
Song 11. Tonight. 7 p.m. Bring nothing. — P.
Emma read the note on the coffee machine four times and then spent the whole day at work unable to think about anything else.
Pieter was not a planner. In ten years, he had planned exactly two things: the proposal, which had gone wrong because it rained, and the houseboat, which had gone wrong because it leaked. He forgot birthdays. He bought presents on the way home. He once took her to a restaurant for Valentine’s Day that turned out to be closed.
So when she came home at 6:58 and found the houseboat completely dark, she was nervous.
“Pieter?”
No answer. A single candle was burning on the kitchen table, beside an envelope.
Don’t turn the lights on. Go up to the roof. Close your eyes on the ladder. — P.
She climbed the ladder with her eyes closed, feeling for every rung.
At the top, a hand took hers. Warm. Familiar. Slightly shaking.
“Keep them closed,” Pieter said. “Three more steps. Okay. Sit.”
She sat. Something soft underneath her. A blanket. She could hear the canal, a bicycle bell on the bridge, a boat engine somewhere far away. She could smell rain and candle wax and something else. Something she knew.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Open.”
The roof was covered in candles.
Dozens of them, in jam jars, along the edges and between the plant pots, flickering gold against the dark water. The string lights were on. And in the middle of the roof, on an old wooden stool, was the thing she had smelled. A huge pot of pea soup. Thick, green, steaming.
Emma stared at it.
“That’s,” she said.
“Your grandmother’s recipe,” said Pieter. “The one you said nobody could ever make again after she died.”
“Nobody has her recipe. She never wrote it down.”
“I know.” He sat down beside her. “I went to see your aunt in Groningen. Four times. She remembered most of it. The rest, I got wrong eleven times. This is number twelve.”
Emma couldn’t speak.
“And there’s this,” he said, and picked something up from behind the stool.
It was a guitar.
Pieter could not play the guitar.
She knew this for a fact. He had tried once, at university, and given up after a week. He had no sense of rhythm. He danced like a falling ladder. He sang in the shower so badly that the neighbours on the next boat had once knocked to ask if he was all right.
He put the guitar on his knee. His hands were trembling.
“I’ve been taking lessons,” he said. “Since February. Tuesday nights. I told you it was the gym.”
“You’ve been going to the gym on Tuesdays for eight months,” Emma said slowly, “and you haven’t lost any weight.”
“That’s why,” said Pieter. “Song eleven. I wrote it. It’s very bad. Please don’t laugh until the end.”
It was very bad.
The chords were slow and careful and occasionally wrong. His voice wobbled. The words didn’t always rhyme. It was a song about a bar in De Pijp and a spilled beer, a car broken down in Portugal, a hospital corridor, a houseboat that leaked, and the girl who had laughed when she could have shouted.
It was the most beautiful thing Emma had ever heard.
By the second verse, she was crying. By the third, so was he, and he played a completely wrong chord and swore and kept going anyway. On the bridge, a couple walking along the canal stopped to listen. When it ended, they clapped. One of them shouted something in Dutch that made Pieter go bright red.
“What did he say?” Emma whispered.
“He said,” Pieter cleared his throat, “that I should keep my day job.”
She laughed so hard she nearly knocked the soup over.
They ate the soup on the roof, wrapped in the blanket.
It tasted exactly like her grandmother’s kitchen. She told him so, and he looked at her as if she had handed him a medal.
“Why?” she asked. “All of this. Eight months.”
Pieter put down his spoon.
“Because you made ten songs about us,” he said, “and every single one of them was something that happened to us. Things we found by accident. I wanted to make something on purpose.” He looked out at the water. “I’ve spent ten years letting good things happen to us. I want to spend the next ten making them happen.”
Emma put her bowl down. She took the guitar off his knee and set it carefully against a plant pot.
Then she took his face in her hands.
“Downstairs,” she said. “Now.”
“The candles,” Pieter said.
“The candles can wait.”
What happened next belonged only to them: the round window and the soft rocking of the boat and the sound of the canal against the hull, a husband and wife who had stopped letting love happen by accident. It was tender and laughing and slow, and somewhere in it, she whispered that she had never loved him more, and meant it completely.
In the morning, there was a USB stick taped to the coffee machine.
It wasn’t shaped like a tulip. It was shaped like a tiny guitar.
On it was a single audio file. Song 11. Recorded on the roof. Very bad.
Emma played it every morning for a month. She told everyone at work it was the best song ever written.
On the back of the envelope, in his handwriting, there was one more line.
Song 12 is yours. You have one year. No pressure. — P.
The End.
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