Inside the parcel was a record. Not an old collectible — a brand-new pressing, still sealed, with a cover I had never seen before. My name was on it. My songs. The ones I’d played in bars for twenty years while my family shook their heads.
My father had recorded me. For years. From a little chair in the back of his shop, on nights I never knew he was there, he had taped every set. Then, sometime in his last months, he took those recordings, had five hundred copies pressed, designed the sleeve himself, and hid the very first one here for me to find.
There was a letter tucked inside the sleeve.
I told everyone you wasted your life on music. The truth is I was too proud to admit I played your tapes every single night after they left. My son is a musician. I should have said it out loud.
He wrote one more thing: that the back room held his real collection — first pressings he had spent fifty years hunting, worth more than the house and the savings put together. The brother who called it a “dead record store” had walked past a fortune every holiday and never once looked in a bin.
I didn’t sell any of it.
I reopened the shop. I put my father’s rare records under glass and my own album in the front window. I play it on the store turntable most afternoons now, and people wander in off the street asking who it is.
I tell them the truth. It’s the black sheep. The one who didn’t waste his life after all.
My brother came by when he heard the collection was worth something. He asked what I planned to “do about it.” I sold him a copy of my record, full price, and told him to give it a listen.