[Intro – old upright piano, faint room ambience] Three notes in the darkness, three notes after midnight. No hand upon the ivory, no footsteps on the stairs. [Verse 1] I came to claim an empty house where ivy climbed the stone, with curtains pale from forty years and rooms that slept alone. My grandmother had left me keys, a name, a silver chain, and one old piano upstairs beside the windowpane. [Pre-Chorus] Then somewhere past the midnight bell, when every candle burned low, three notes fell through the ceiling boards, soft as forgotten snow. [Chorus] Play it once, play it slowly, let the old house breathe. There’s a song beneath the floorboards, there’s a name beneath the years. Eight bars lost to silence, eight bars no one knew. Someone left a song unfinished, and waited here for you. [Instrumental – solo violin answers the piano] [Verse 2] Beneath a board beside the stairs I found a folded page, brown with dust and candle smoke, made fragile there by age. The melody was written clear until the final line, then suddenly the ink was gone after measure twenty-nine. [Pre-Chorus] I placed the paper on the stand and played what still remained. Then from the dark behind my chair a woman's voice began. [Chorus] Play it once, play it slowly, let the old house breathe. There’s a song beneath the floorboards, there’s a name beneath the years. Eight bars lost to silence, eight bars no one knew. Someone left a song unfinished, and waited here for you. [Bridge – whispered female voice, sparse piano] No words. Only humming. Eight measures I had never seen... Yet somehow I knew them. [Instrumental – cello enters, violin carries the unknown melody] [Verse 3] My fingers found the missing notes as though they'd always known. The violin inside my mind no longer played alone. And when I struck the final chord, the other voice grew still. A candle by the window died, though there had been no wind. [Final Chorus – piano, violin, cello, restrained orchestral swell] Play it once, play it slowly, let the old house breathe. Every song that's left unfinished leaves an echo underneath. Eight bars freed from silence, eight bars finally true. Someone left a song unfinished... Tonight I carried it through. [Outro – solo piano] Morning entered through the glass. Upon the piano lay the page. And beneath my final line... another hand had written: Thank you.
