It was the last song of the night. Stevie had been singing for almost two hours, steaming under the spotlights, her heart hammering and her legs seeming to have traded their muscles and bones for hot, bendy rubber. The amplifiers had a tangible pulse. Her head was buzzing as she crouched at the edge of the stage to a burst of needy applause.
She extended her hand to them. The band drummed and strummed behind her.
The crowd converged on her, reaching, gasping, grasping. Their fingers brushed her fingers. There were tugs and shakes, some high fives. A heavy rhinestone bracelet was yanked from her wrist. She drew back her hand to remove the black ring on her thumb and tossed it at the waving, shadowy suggestion of a girl a few rows away.
One of the lighting guys zeroed in on the gesture, and a bright beam that had been circling over the heads of the audience followed the costume jewelry's trajectory over the flailing hands that sprung up to snatch it. Faces lost to the blackness beyond the stage were revealed to her in a rapid flash. Stranger's faces, dazzled faces. Precious and hungry faces who came to hear her, who loved her songs, who claimed to love her on the basis of her music alone.
The ring nearly made it to its target. Stevie could see the girl clearly now. Her hair was red and held back by coppery, glinting barrettes. She couldn't have been a month over thirteen. Her hands were outstretched, palms cupped, not clawing at the air but simply waiting for the ring to come to her.
Then a sun-browned hand reached over top her head and took it.
The light shone on Michael's new face. He held Stevie's ring in his fist, standing motionless and unsmiling, looking bored by both the music and the crowd.
Their eyes met.
She was surprised to notice he had grown a beard—actually a close-clipped mustache and goatee—since she saw him last. Weirdly meticulous for a guy who used to make a running joke out of his ability to get up, shower, and be out the door of their apartment in less than five minutes flat. He was wearing a white suit-coat that made him appear antiseptically surgical, way out of place at a rock concert. Maybe he was pretending to be someone else again. A hard-nosed yacht salesman? A flamboyant and calculating drug kingpin? She could only guess. Whatever role he was playing, her curiosity was just a faint white noise underscoring the much greater shock of having him there in the same room with her.
Stevie had stopped singing. Vic, the lead guitarist, shot her a confused look and launched into an impromptu solo to mask her silence.
She swallowed and kept staring, waiting to feel some sense of recognition, but none came. She tried not to let that bother her. Of course he seemed like a stranger. He wasn't—would never again look like—the boyish fiancé she remembered, wide-eyed and gangly when they first met, stammering as he tried to ask her to go to that cheesy werewolf movie with him, offering her a too-full glass of champagne punch she thought would splash onto her sweater at any moment. (Even obviously nervous, his grip had held steady, and he hadn't spilled a drop.) That didn't mean he wasn't still Michael, somehow, in some form.
She hoped what brought him there was nothing too terrible.
No matter how she tried, she couldn't think of any good reason that would compel him to seek her out.
Stevie dropped his gaze and finished her song. The final note went sharp.
