Allison’s POV
I almost didn't go. I stood in my suite for twenty minutes with my shoes on and his voice in my head — be close to the stage tonight, just trust me — and I almost didn't go. Because trusting Aiden Blackwell had cost me something every single time I'd done it.
I went anyway. Because I'd never been smart about him, and the part that wanted to see what he'd do was louder than the part that wanted to survive it.
The arena was full. Twenty thousand people in the dark, phone lights and the electric hum of a crowd waiting for something to happen to them. I stood in the wings — stage left, behind the monitor stack, close enough to see the sweat on Aiden's neck. Jude behind the kit, Tommy on bass, the crew moving with choreographed precision.
The show started. First three songs — the hits, the stolen ones, my words amplified to stadium volume. Twenty thousand people singing lyrics I'd written at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. My stolen voice coming back from twenty thousand throats — a haunting with a beat and a light show.
Fourth song. Fifth. He was performing at full voltage but I could see something underneath — a tightness in his jaw between songs, his eyes cutting to the wings where I stood. He was building toward something. The set was a runway and he was accelerating.
Seventh song ended. The arena roared. Aiden stood at the microphone with his chest heaving and the lights making his face into something carved and monumental. He raised his hand. The crowd hushed — not silence, but the particular stillness of an audience sensing a shift.
"I need to tell you something." His voice was raw and close in the monitors, intimate despite the scale, a man speaking to twenty thousand people like he was speaking to one. "I've been lying to you. All of you. For eight years."
The hush deepened. I gripped the monitor stack. My knuckles went white.
"I'm a thief." He said it into the microphone the way you'd say it to a priest — quiet, certain, the confession of a man who'd carried it long enough. "When I was seventeen, there was a girl. She wrote poetry in a notebook — real poetry, the kind that reaches into your chest and rearranges what it finds. And I stole it. I took her notebook and I built everything you see —" he gestured at the stage, the lights, the arena "— on words that were never mine."
Twenty thousand people were silent. Not polite silence. The stunned, airless silence of people hearing something they hadn't prepared for.
"Every song you've loved. Every lyric you've tattooed on your skin or screamed at the top of your lungs — those words belong to a girl I was too cruel and too scared to love the way she deserved. I read her poem aloud behind a shed to make people laugh because if they were laughing at her they weren't looking at me. And then I took her notebook home and turned her pain into my career."
His voice cracked. He didn't hide it. Twenty thousand people heard it crack and nobody moved.
"I've been sober for forty-three days. Because of her. Because she came back into my life and instead of destroying me, she handed me a pen and said write your own words. The new songs tonight — those are mine. The first real things I've ever made." He looked down at the guitar. "She taught me I wasn't empty."
He looked toward the wings. Toward me. His eyes found mine through the stage lights and the expression on his face was the one I'd been cataloging — the unguarded flash, the face underneath — except now it was amplified by twenty thousand witnesses and a microphone and the irreversible fact of what he was doing.
"Her name is Allison Calloway." My name in the arena, filling the space where his stolen lyrics had lived for eight years. "She has the most extraordinary voice I've ever heard. And I love her. I've loved her since I was seventeen and too broken to know it." He held the microphone with both hands. "Allison. Come out here."
The wings blurred. Someone behind me — a tech, a crew member — put a hand on my shoulder and said "go" and I walked onstage on legs that didn't belong to me into a light so bright that for three steps I couldn't see anything at all.
Then my eyes adjusted. Twenty thousand faces. Twenty thousand phones raised like electric candles. And Aiden at the microphone with his cracked voice and his eyes on me like I was the only solid thing in a room full of light.
He held out a mic. I took it. My hand was shaking badly enough that the mic broadcast the tremor to the arena — twenty thousand people heard my fear and I didn't care because Aiden had just burned his career to the ground and the least I could do was stand in the ashes with him.
He turned back to the crowd. "This is a song we wrote together. The morning after she taught me to write my own words for the first time in eight years." His voice was steady now — the steadiness of a man who'd already jumped and was falling and had decided to enjoy the view. "It's called 'Fake Lakes.' And it's the most honest thing I've ever been part of."
He sat at the piano. Played the opening chord of the duet — our song, the one from the morning after, silence and fake lakes and two voices. I opened my mouth and the first note came out shaking and imperfect and real, and then his melody caught mine and held it and the shaking stopped.
We sang. His voice and mine, woven together in front of twenty thousand strangers who'd come to hear Hollow Saints and were hearing something else — two people who'd destroyed each other and rebuilt each other singing a song that belonged to both of them.
The chorus hit and the arena went silent and then not silent — a collective breath that became a roar that became something alive, something that shook the stage floor and traveled up my spine and into the place where the old wound lived, and the wound didn't close but it changed, became a door instead of a scar.
The last note hung. The arena erupted. I stood there with the mic in my shaking hand and tears on my face and the roar of twenty thousand people who'd just watched a man tear himself open and hand the pieces to the woman he loved.
Backstage. The same corridor where he'd called me his sitter two days ago. He was vibrating — adrenaline, terror, the aftermath of doing something so irreversible that the only direction left was forward.
"What was that?" My voice was wrecked, my hands still shaking, the roar still in my ears.
"The least I can do." His hands were shaking worse than mine. "You wanted a stage. I've owed you that since I was seventeen." He stepped closer. "Finish the tour with us. Not as my keeper. As a member. Your voice, your words, our songs."
I looked at him. The man who'd stolen my notebook and called me his sitter in this exact corridor and then walked onto a stage and lit his whole world on fire because a drummer asked if it mattered how I got here.
I forgave him. Not because the hurt didn't matter — it did, it would always matter, the shed and the notebook and eight years of my words in someone else's mouth would always ache the way stolen things ache. But he'd stood in front of the world and burned his own armor. Not for applause. Not for redemption. For me.
I kissed him. In the corridor, with the roar still echoing through the concrete and his hands shaking against my jaw and my tears on both our faces and the taste of honesty — terrifying, irreversible, finally real.