5. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
The car pulls up to the loading dock behind the Forum, and Tristan hasn’t let go of my hand the whole drive.
He lifts it now, presses his mouth to my knuckles, and lingers there a second longer than he needs to. “You’re sure you’re okay sitting out front? I could put you somewhere quieter. Side stage, wherever you want.”
“I’m okay.” It comes out steadier than I feel. “I want to see you the way everyone else sees you. From the crowd.”
“Yeah?” He looks at me as if the answer means more than it should. “I like that.”
Then the door opens and the noise pours in, and the calm of the car is gone.
Backstage is a machine mid-swallow, headsets and cables and people moving fast in every direction, someone already saying his name, someone already reaching for him.
He keeps my hand anyway, tucking me against his side, steering us both through the chaos as if he can keep this small bubble of us intact if he just holds on tight enough.
We stop near the mouth of a hallway that leads to the stage.
This is where I lose him. We both know it.
“Hey.”
He turns to face me, both hands framing my jaw now, his thumbs brushing my cheekbones. Up close, under the ugly fluorescent light, I can see how tired he is under the mask, how much this night is costing him.
“Two hours. That’s all. Then this will be over and we’ll have time to fix everything else. You and me, and a very overpriced hotel room where I don’t answer my phone for anyone. We’ll take a break from all of it, I swear.”
I search his face, and there that fragile, terrifying hope rising in me again. The same reckless thing that made me lean into his arms weeks ago instead of walking out the door.
This is the gamble. The whole of it, riding on the next two hours. One shot to show me the boy from the rooftop is still in there.
I nod, and I give him the best smile I have in me.
“Good luck out there,” is all I say, because it’s all I trust myself to say.
His own smile answers mine, that boyish charm dashing back to life beneath the exhaustion, the effort he’s putting into holding it together for me is not lost at all.
Then he leans in and kisses me.
It isn’t a quick kiss. His mouth moves over mine slow and deep, one hand sliding to the back of my neck to hold me there, and I feel the yearning in it, the apology, the promise, all the things he’s better at saying this way than out loud.
Tristan kisses me as if he’s been deprived of it, as if he’s trying to memorize me before he goes, and I let myself sink into it, let it quiet the noise in my head for one stolen moment.
When we finally break apart, we’re both a little breathless, and he rests his forehead against mine, unwilling to pull all the way back.
“See you after this,” he murmurs against my lips, and presses one last soft peck there.
“See you.” My chest feels lighter than it has in days.
“Tristan, we need you. Now.” The woman with the headset, losing patience.
“Yeah. Coming.” He drags his thumb once more across my cheek, then steps back, letting his hand trail down my arm until our fingers slip apart.
I lift mine in a small wave. “Go.”
And then the crowd of staff closes around him and he’s gone, swallowed whole, just another shape swept toward the light.
Just like that, I’m standing alone in a concrete hallway with the bass already thudding through the floor.
A handler appears at my side a moment later. “Mrs. Everett? Let me show you to your seat.”
I take one last look down the hallway where he disappeared, then square my shoulders and follow her toward the noise, carrying that fragile scrap of hope with me.
***
The seats they’ve given me are unreal, close enough that I’ll be able to see the sweat on his face, angled just off center so the whole stage opens up in front of me.
A sea of people stretches out in every direction, filling the floor, climbing the tiers into the dark, twenty thousand strangers here to worship the man who couldn’t clear one evening for me weeks ago.
I’m still finding my seat when I notice the woman beside it, and for a second I don’t recognize her at all.
She’s turned toward the stage, her profile lit gold by the house lights, her hair different from how she wore it last. Softer, looser, brushed out long the way it hasn’t been in years. My brain files her under a stranger for one full beat before she turns and her whole face lights up.
“There you are!” Hallie throws her arms around me before I’ve even sat down, warm and familiar, drenched in that perfume I’d know anywhere. “I was starting to think you’d bailed on me.”
“I’d never.” I hug her back, and the strangeness dissolves. Of course it’s Hallie. “Sorry, I almost walked right past you. You look… wow. Different.”
“Good different?” She pulls back and does a little shimmy in her seat, showing off. “I felt like a change.”
“Very good different.” I take her in properly now, and I feel my own smile falter for reasons I can’t name. She’s in a deep jewel tone, sleek and simple, the neckline and the cut almost a mirror of mine. “Wait. Are we… did we… do we match?”
“Oh my God.” She looks down at herself, then at me, and laughs, delighted. “We do. I swear I didn’t do that on purpose. Great minds.”
She reaches over and fixes a piece of my hair that doesn’t need fixing. “God, look at us. Do you know what this reminds me of? Sophomore year. That awful winter formal where we both showed up in green and refused to go home and change out of spite.”
The memory tugs a laugh out of me despite everything. “We looked ridiculous, like twins.”
“We looked iconic.” She settles back, tossing that long loose hair over one shoulder, and there’s a thing about the gesture that snags at me, some half-formed thought I can’t quite catch. “I’ve just been feeling nostalgic lately, I guess. Wanting to feel like myself again. You know how it is.”
“Yeah.” I don’t, actually, but I let it go. “It suits you.”
“Everything suits me, babe. It’s a curse.”
She grins and knocks her knee against mine, and at that moment, we’re twenty again, two girls in over their heads at a party too fancy for them, and I feel the tight thing in my chest loosen by a fraction. At least I’m not alone up here. At least I have her.
The whispers start before the lights even go down.
They’re not trying very hard to be quiet, the two women in the row behind us, heads tipped together, eyes flicking toward me and away.
“That’s her, right? The one on the left?”“Tristan’s wife?”“I think so. God, she’s tiny in person.”“Which one is she? The dark-haired one?”“Wait, is the girl beside her an influencer? I think I follow her.”
I keep my eyes fixed forward and pretend the heat isn’t crawling up my neck.
In all the years we’ve been together, from dating until now, I have never once gotten used to this. The way being married to Tristan turned me into a thing people discuss in the third person while I’m sitting right in front of them.
A curiosity, footnote to his fame. As if I’m a puzzle to be solved instead of a person with ears.
“You okay?” Hallie murmurs, following my glance without turning her head. “Ignore them. They’re just jealous of the seat.”
“I’m fine.” I straighten my spine and lift my chin, the posture my mother drilled into me before I could read. “I’m used to it.”
I’m not. But I’ve gotten very good at pretending, and tonight I only have to make it through a couple of hours.
For him. For us.
For the version of this night where everything turns out okay.
Then the house lights die, and thousands of people rise to their feet screaming at once as every thought in my head burns clean away.
He walks out into a wall of sound.
No opening act, no build, just Tristan Everett strolling into the center of that enormous stage with his guitar slung low and a grin that says he knows exactly what he does to a room.
The screaming climbs into a clamor almost physical, a pressure against my skin, and he lets it wash over him, head bowed, soaking it in, before he leans into the mic and says, low and easy.
“Hey, L.A. It’s good to be home.”
They lose it. Of course they do.
And then he starts to play, and my breath catches, because I know this song.
Everyone knows this song. It’s the one that made him; his first real hit, the one that turned a rich boy with a guitar into a name on a marquee.
“And it took root the day you turned my way,” he sings, and the whole arena sings it back to him, twenty thousand voices carrying words he wrote about that one certain memory. “Been blooming helpless ever since…”
I heard him write the end of this song.
Because I was the end of this song.
My heart does that thing it does, loosening and aching in the same breath, a knot and a wound at once.
And there he is.
Not the man who leaves notes on the counter, not the stranger who texts me apologies from studios at 3 a.m.
The other one. The boy from the rooftop who climbed a trellis for a fat cat and made me laugh at my own father’s funeral, lit up from the inside, exactly where he was always meant to be.
It’s impossible to watch him up there and believe he belongs anywhere but on a stage.
He is so completely, effortlessly himself in front of these people.
Yet some small, treacherous part of me wonders if that’s the problem. If there was never going to be enough of him left over for a quiet apartment and a woman waiting up.
I push the thought down and let the music take me instead.
Tristan looks at me during the second song. And the fourth. And somewhere in the middle of a slow one, a ballad I’ve heard him play a hundred times, his eyes find mine across all that distance and hold, and he tips me the smallest wink before turning back to the crowd.
Heat blooms in my chest, embarrassing and warm. I press my lips together to keep from grinning like an idiot.
“Oh my God,” whispers one of the girls to my right, clutching her friend’s arm. “Did you see that? He keeps looking over here! He’s done it like four times!”
“He’s looking at someone down here for sure,” her friend whispers back. “Lucky!”