And we all share,

The feeling of love.”

Yes! Nola tapped her feet and flipped her head from side to side, hair swinging. The crowd was on its feet, blurry through the tangle of her rust-colored curls. She repeated the refrain in French, Spanish, and then Chinese to a field of swaying arms as thousands sang along. Their voices carried beyond the southern wall of the Forbidden City into Tiananmen Square. Eleven years after the massacre, she was the lucky one to honor the dead—and the living.

“And we all share,

The feeling of love. Love. Love.”

The breeze caressed her hot skin. She held the last note until a new round of applause exploded. “Thank you,” she called, her body resonating with the beat of the music, eager to go on. “Thank you all so very much!”

Wade, her husband, stepped out of the left wing with a glass of water. “A Divine Songbird,” he mouthed. It was the title People magazine had given her fifteen years before, when she had burst on the scene as a teenager. She gulped down the water and turned back toward the crowd.

Her gown felt light and fluid as it streamed over her body and its sequined glitter captured the rosy glow of the stage lights. She raised her arm high to unfurl the train of her dress, attached to her wrist. Like a butterfly’s wing, it flashed from pink to orange to a fiery red.

The crowd roared, demanding another encore. The hooded-eyed Chinese prime minister, seated in his cordoned box, rose to his feet and clapped. His lips read, “Bravo! Bravo!” and Nola lifted her eyes to the inky sky where her song lingered, where her mother was surely watching, still disbelieving that Nola could ever make it.

The fragrance of honeysuckle and orange blossoms wafted through the night air. Nola's fingers brushed the cords in her neck, taut, ready for more. Behind her, the band broke into “A String of Magical Moments,” and she was back with the thousands of upturned faces, singing to them and wishing this magical moment would never end. What else was there? Her offstage life, just several feet away, loomed colorless and stifling.

But Wade’s hand signaled a T from behind the silk-embroidered curtain. Her time was up. If he didn’t monitor the instant the audience’s fervor for her peaked, she would linger like a guest overstaying her welcome.

Single flowers wrapped in fine rice paper and bouquets tied with silk ribbons flew up and landed at her feet. Stealing time, she gathered a few flowers, selected an orchid and presented it to Jean-Claude, her musical director. He tossed his shaggy dark hair off his shoulders, and his eyes held hers in a shared moment of victory. Reluctantly, she broke the contact, blew a kiss to her musicians and waved again to the crowd. “I love you so very much,” she said into the microphone.