Kristen squeezed my arm. “Are you hearing this? What is he talking about?”

I shook my head, tears starting to well in my eyes. “I don’t know,” I breathed.

He chuckled a little. “The funny thing is, I got what I wanted. I wanted her to get over me. And you know what? She did.” He dragged a hand down his mouth. “Yeah. She’s on a date tonight. I saw her. Went down to her art gallery and saw her with some guy when I was about to come out. It fucking killed me,” he whispered. “I thought breaking up with her was hard. But seeing that…”

My mouth went dry. I couldn’t even breathe. “Kristen, he was there.” I was afraid to take my eyes off him to look at her. “He was there,” I whispered. “He came.”

This time he didn’t recover as quickly. He went quiet for a long moment and the audience simmered to a hush. Cell phones hovered over heads, recording video. You could have heard a pin drop in the arena. They were hanging on his words.

Jason squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them, his tone was sad. “You think you know what love looks like. You think the fairy tales and the romantic movies prepare you. And then you finally, really truly find it and you realize you never knew a thing about it until her.” He shook his head. “She was every love song I’ve never been good enough to write.” His voice cracked on the last word.

“Sloan,” Kristen whispered. “Everybody’s crying…” She tapped me. “Look.”

I tore my eyes from the stage to look around. The woman next to me had her hand over her mouth and tears running down her face. Everyone did.

Jason wiped at his eyes with his thumb and picked up his guitar. “I’ll never get her back. It’s too late for that. But this song is for Sloan anyway. It’s called ‘Proof.’”

My fragile heart shattered. I completely lost it. I leaned forward, hands over my mouth, and sobbed.

He sang.

It was poetry about a woman who was every season. She was the muffled moment when snow started to fall. A soft, beguiling spring fog over a glass lake. The full moon, white and unmarred in an inky-black summer sky. An autumn so vibrant you can die feeling peace because your eyes have seen it.

It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever written. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

And it was mine.

I wasn’t surrounded by thousands of captivated Jaxon fans. Kristen wasn’t sitting next to me. Jaxon wasn’t even there. This was Jason singing. And every word was a declaration of unrivaled love, an apology, and a plea for forgiveness—to no one. Because he didn’t even know I was here. He thought it was nothing but a cry into the void to a woman who’d moved on.

He was so, so wrong.

When it ended, the crowd went insane. I’d never heard them like that. Not even after his most popular songs.

His sad eyes scanned his screaming fans like none of it mattered to him. Like he didn’t care one way or another whether they liked it because he was too broken to feel anything but the emptiness that I’d been feeling for the last three months.

And then he stopped cold.

He put a hand up to block the lights and squinted out over the crowd.

“Oh. My. God,” Kristen breathed next to me.

He just stood there, staring.

At me.

It wasn’t possible.

I was one face in the thousands on the floor. I was buried in the crowd. I had a hat on and glasses and the lights were in his eyes. But he was looking right at me. He was looking at me so intensely people started turning around to look at me too.

I couldn’t move. I was frozen to my seat.

And then Jason dropped his guitar and jumped off the stage.

A laughing sob burst from my lips. Kristen grabbed at my sweater, yanked my beanie and glasses off. “Go! Go!” She spun me and shoved me toward the aisle.

“Let me through!” I started to push my way out of the row. “Please!”

I managed to get to the aisle, but once I did, my progress stopped. I wasn’t the only one trying to get out.

Bodies surged toward the front. Fans folded in around Jason on all sides, and I lost sight of him. I only knew where he was because they kept the Jumbotrons trained on him as he tried to make his way through the throng.

It was complete mayhem.

He didn’t have any security with him like he usually did. He’d stage dived before they knew what was happening. There was nobody to keep the swarming fans back.

“Jason!” The chaos drowned out my voice. Everyone was pushing in the same direction I was, trying to get closer to the same man. I wasn’t moving.

I looked around frantically. I had to get higher. I climbed a seat and stood on top of it, people bumping into my back and legs. He was still fifteen feet away, but he saw me. “Sloan!”

As soon as he pointed me out, the camera for the Jumbotron panned back and then zoomed in on me. I could see myself, twenty feet tall in my red dress and tattoos, tears running down my face.

That’s when people seemed to understand what was happening. The crowd began to make a path to let him through and gentle hands guided me down to the floor and toward him. It felt like the ebb of the ocean. A riptide sucking me out to sea. They parted for me and then folded in after me, pushing me forward. And then suddenly the only person in front of me was him.

We both paused for a breathless second before we dove for each other. I jumped, wrapping my legs around his waist, and he caught me.