On a night with no other calls, a stranger phones a tiny seaside radio station and asks for one song at one exact minute. She gives no name. She asks the host to play it, then hang up. And Marion Ottaway, forty-four and alone at the overnight desk of a station nobody much listens to anymore, understands what the woman means it to be. The last thing she ever hears.

Marion will not play it.

Instead she keeps the woman talking, through the small hours, past the shipping report, all the way to the grey light of dawn. And somewhere in that long dark she makes a quiet promise. Before the next night falls, she will give this stranger back one true thing. Not a song. The person that song was always for.

With her odd little crew of night owls and the whole hopeful reach of the wireless behind her, Marion goes looking for a daughter gone eleven years, and for the woman who has spent every one of them believing she was not worth coming home to. Some songs are a way of saying stay.

This is the first night at the All-Night Wireless, where the loneliest hour finds a voice, and nobody is ever quite as alone as they think.