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She turned back toward the shadows behind the drum riser, where Jax, Toby, and Elena were catching their breath and wiping sweat from their faces.

‘You lot mind if I do this one on my own?’ Ashley asked, her voice quiet under the dull roar of the crowd chanting her name.

Jax wiped their forehead with a towel, exchanged a glance with Toby and Elena, and gave Ashley an easy nod. ‘Go on, Ash. All yours.’

Usually, this was where she’d play the big radio single from her first album, ‘Broken Eyes’, with the full band driving the chorus. But tonight was different.

She handed her electric off to a waiting tech, took her acoustic, and walked back out into the spotlight. The band stayed back in the shadows, their instruments quiet, leaving her alone with three thousand glowing phone screens and a silence waiting to be filled.

‘I’m not doing the usual encore tonight,’ Ashley said into the mic. Her voice sounded gravelly through the monitors, stripped of its stage polish. ‘I wrote something this afternoon on the bus. It’s not really finished, so give me a little grace if it sucks.’

She didn’t wait for them to quiet down. She struck that flat, heavy D-minor chord she’d found three hours ago and let it rumble through the subwoofers.

The lyrics came out exactly as they had on the bus, blunt and slightly awkward, devoid of the metaphors she usually used to hide her life from the press. It wasn’t catchy, and there wasn’t really a chorus. But it was her best work in a long time.

The screen went dark, the suit was gone

He sold me Japan before the dawn

Said, ‘Four more months, we’ve drawn the line’

And I nodded along and surrendered my time

I was sitting in a room with the AC cold

Counting up the time that I’d just sold

Didn’t even know what town I was in

Just a hollow girl in a rented skin

So I dialled your face through a burning light

Hoping you’d tell me I was doing right.

The room had gone strangely quiet. Not the respectful quiet of a theatre, but the heavy stillness of a crowd realising they were watching something unrehearsed and dangerous happen on stage. Ashley kept her eyes fixed on the back exit sign, refusing to look at the crowd.

And then you broke down, you laid it on the line

You gave me the truth, and I ran out of time

You said ‘I love you’ through the pixelated screen

The most terrifying thing that I’d ever seen

My chest swelled up, my throat closed tight

I wanted to scream it with all my might

I wanted to tell you

I wanted to love you

But I choked on the words and the screen went black

But I was a coward, and the screen went black.

Ashley played on. She didn’t care if they liked it. She felt light. For the first time in years, she wasn’t trying to sell anything. She was just telling the truth to three thousand strangers because she’d been too chicken to tell it to the one person who mattered. She hoped that meant something. She hoped she was doing something to make herself brave. She didn’t want to be a coward anymore.