Emily smiled, took a deep breath, and walked out on stage, Ezra following her and then waiting in the wings so he could see her perform in person—and so she could see him, too. The audience was dark, but she could feel all thousand of them—quiet, tense, electric. The stage was dark, too, except for a spot focused on a grand piano, set up just for her. Emily felt the adrenaline race through her as she took her first steps out into the darkness. She was where she was meant to be.

She sat down on the piano bench and adjusted the mic. And she began to play. She shared her story through words, through music. And she felt transformed. She felt filled with light and energy and love. She’d written these songs to make sense of her life, to make sense of her feelings. And now she was sharing them with the world. Her heart was open, like Rob’s. Like Ezra’s.

When she finished her second-to-last song, the one she’d written for Ezra in Mexico, there was a rush of applause. Emily felt it wash over her, wash through her.

“Thank you for being such a great audience,” she said into the mic. “I know you’re all excited to see Austin Roberts tonight, but I’ve got one more song before you do. It’s called ‘Dark Night of the Soul,’ and it’s a song that I wrote about something my love and I went through together.” The song was powerful as a duet, but here, now, it had to be a solo.

Emily started playing, imagining that the music in this song wasn’t for the crowd but for the cells that might be dividing inside her. For Ezra, who was singing along in the wings.

As Emily played, as she sang, as the audience focused their attention on the stage, she remembered how it felt when Ezra’s voice had twined with hers. She remembered how they’d forgiven each other’s mistakes and let their love grow stronger.

When she got to the final line of the song, she sang the lyrics they used together when the song was a duet—she sang “our” instead of “mine.” And when she looked into the wings, Ezra touched his hand to his heart. He’d noticed. After the song ended, Emily echoed the last line of the melody on the piano and then held the damper pedal so that the notes resonated for a moment after she stopped playing.

The audience burst into applause, but instead of looking at them, she looked back at Ezra. A piece of his hair had flopped in front of his glasses, and he was grinning more than she’d seen him in a long time.