He clicks a button on his belt. Nods once. “All right. You’re live.”
The moment the mic goes hot, there’s a shift in my chest. My power, my voice, my purpose returning.
I adjust the microphone stand attached to the piano, angling it toward my mouth. Then I turn to face the crowd—all twenty-some thousand of them, phones raised, faces expectant, waiting to see what happens next.
“Hey, Miami.” My voice echoes through the arena—eerie against the sudden dead silence. “I want to end this show with something a little different, if that’s okay with you.”
A scattered cheer. They’re curious now.
“One of my sweetest memories as a little girl was sitting next to my dad, Nate, while he taught me to play the piano.” My fingers drift across the keys, not playing anything yet, just touching. Remembering. “I was so impatient at first. I didn’t want to play the classics. I was ready to be the next Hannah Montana, you know?” There’s a low hum of laughter at the nostalgia. “But he was so patient with me, teaching me the fundamentals, so when I started to create, I always had something solid to fall back on. I’ve been playing piano for over ten years, but I don’t think I’ve ever played for you guys live. No time like the present, right?”
The arena is dead silent. Waiting.
“I want to sing you one more song tonight. It’s not one of mine—it’s by an artist I really admire. And the reason I’m singing it is because someone very special to me once told me that I sang it like an angel. He was probably lying, but it lit me up the way he said it. It made me believe in myself a little bit more.”
The crowd murmurs. I can practically hear them thinking:Grayson. She’s talking about Grayson.
But my eyes find the wings, stage right, where a tall figure in all black is standing just out of the spotlight’s reach. Taio. He’s watching me with that quiet intensity, that same look he had in the dressing room, and even from this distance, I can see the question in his eyes:What the hell are you doing?
I smile. Just for him.
“This one is for someone special,” I say into the mic. “But it’s also for me.”
I play the opening notes.
The song is “Stay” by Rihanna—the same song I was singing the night Taio first knocked. I was alone in that penthouse, having no idea that my life was about to come alive. The hero I didn’t want to need was already on his way.
My fingers move across the keys, building the arrangement I’ve played a hundred times in private but never once in public. The melody is simple, haunting. A song about not being able to make someone stay. About needing them anyway. About the impossible ache of wanting something you’re not sure you can have.
And then I open my mouth, and I sing.
Not the manufactured voice. Not the compressed, auto-tuned, producer-approved version of Charlie Riley that exists in studio recordings. The realest, rawest version of my voice on display with no armor. This is me. The real me. Not all of you will like it.But who here will love it?
The first verse pours out of me—rich and aching and alive. I let my voice crack where it wants to crack. I let the emotion bleed through where the producers would have smoothed it away. This isn’t a performance. This is a confession.
I close my eyes and disappear into the music, letting the trance take over.
The arena falls away. The crowd falls away. The scandal, the headlines—all of it dissolves until there’s nothing left but me and this piano and this song and the memories of all the times I’ve played it before.
Nate’s proud smile. Spencer’s teary eyes, her hand clutched over her chest. Claire’s roaring cheers. Taio, looking positively hypnotized when he finally laid eyes on the girl behind the voice.
You belong to yourself more than you belong to them.
I understand it now. What Taio was trying to tell me. The crowd’s not my enemy. My obsessive desire to please them is. When’s the last time I cared about how I saw myself instead of how the world saw me?
It starts now.
This is mine.
This moment. This song. This voice.
Mine.
The bridge builds. I lean into the high notes, letting my voice soar in ways I haven’t allowed myself in years. The runs I’ve been suppressing. The riffs I’ve been trained out of. All of it, finally free.
I pour my guts onto those keys—the bone-deep exhaustion that makes my limbs feel like concrete, the terror that claws at my throat every time I step on stage, the loneliness that has hollowed me out until I’m nothing but an echo chamber of other people’s expectations. And still I sing, voice breaking, fingers trembling, while the man in the wings watches me bleed truth all over this beautiful, polished stage.
The final chorus approaches. I can feel the crowd holding its breath. So many people, suspended in silence, waiting for me to take them somewhere they’ve never been.
