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The crowd screams. She laughs, low and easy.

“Because I am so close to home tonight. So, so close. Four hours up the coast and I am back where I grew up.”

She isn’t looking at the crowd. She is looking at me through the gap in the curtain ten feet off her shoulder, her chin tipping a quarter inch in my direction.

“I am going to play something for you guys tonight that I have never played anywhere before,” she continues, her hand dragging slow along the mic stand. “Not in the studio. Not on the radio. Not at a show. It’s a new one. I wrote it last month, and I’ve been waiting for the right moment to sing it for the first time. I think this is the right moment. Is that okay with you, Boston?”

The crowd erupts.

She nods at the band. The drummer drops out. The kid on keys slides into a soft progression I haven’t heard before, slow and warm and a little sad at the edges, and Sienna lifts the mic off the stand and sits down on the lip of the stage with her feet over the edge.

She closes her eyes. She opens her mouth. “This one is called ‘Coming Home to Lover Boy’.”

The first verse comes out low and a little husky, the kind of singing she does in my kitchen at one in the morning when she doesn’t know I’m listening.

Four hours up the coast and a porch light on. Knew you’d leave it burning if I came home, lover boy. Wait for me, oh, lover boy.

Five thousand bodies in the dark have gone silent, every phone lifted, every face tipped toward her.

Maine in my mouth and your smoke in my hair. Six years of bad reasons not to be there. Lover boy, hold still, I’m coming home.

The keys hit a minor under her voice. She tips her head back. The mic is loose in her hand as she stands and strolls across the stage closer to me.

I can love you from afar. I can love you in the stars. I can be the Venus to your Mars.

I haven’t let myself think about her feelings for me. I didn’t give myself a chance to believe that she loves me back. That she has wanted me as much as I have wanted her. Is she telling me she loves me in front of five thousand people? Has she been looking at me the same way I’ve been looking at her all this time?

I’m coming home to a lover boy. I’m coming home, I’m coming home.

The chorus hits and her voice goes up into the rafters of the TD Garden. I lean my forehead against the cold steel of a lighting truss in the wings and watch as she drops to her knees, singing out the final note, and my heart is racing a thousand miles a minute.

She closes the show with her highest-grossing hit: ‘Teenage Problems’.

When the last note bleeds out, the arena loses its mind. She blows a kiss into the lights, and the lift drops her into the floor.

I push off the wall and cross the back of the stage at a pace just shy of running, but before I get far, Nicki steps in front of me, a palm on my chest.

“Mr. Douglas,” she says, dropping her hand. “I am so sorry. Echo has had to leave.”

“Excuse me?” I glare at her hand.

“A car is waiting for her at the loading dock. She has a one a.m. flight to Los Angeles to catch; the label called a meeting that couldn’t wait.” Her clipboard doesn’t move. The smile doesn’t falter. “She felt terrible that she didn’t have time to come back to the dressing room. She asked me to make sure you got home safe.”

“She said she would be back here after the show.” I push the words out between my teeth.

“She did,” Nicki agrees, the corners of her mouth pulling. “And then the label called. Mr. Douglas, this is the life of a superstar. You understand.”

“No,” I bite, my hands going into my pockets. The velvet box hits my knuckle. “I don’t understand.”

“It happens, Mr. Douglas.” She tilts her head, the pity she lets onto her face the kind that has been rehearsed in a mirror. “It’s show business.”

She holds out a black canvas tote.

“She wanted you to have a few things. Vinyl. A hoodie. The signed print is one of a kind.”

I almost laugh.

This is the same tote bag that every other man in that line tonight is walking back to his car with. A vinyl. A signed print. A hoodie folded by an assistant. Nicki is handing me the fan version of the woman I’ve been in love with since I was sixteen.