> "You looked at me like I was borrowed,"
"Like this voice was on loan from something you'd already lost."
Alex sang with no vibrato. No dramatics.
Every word dropped clean and low, like it had weight.
Like she was handing the lyrics to the room one at a time.
It wasn't a show. It wasn't even pretty.
But it was precise. Surgical.
And the audience — they stopped breathing.
Elias's fingers moved automatically across the keys. Soft, steady, locked into tempo.
But he wasn't looking at the music anymore.
He was watching her.
She didn't perform like Jenna — no flash, no smirk, no winks at the crowd.
Alex performed like someone holding a match over a gas tank, one spark away from turning everything into something she couldn't take back.
> "You say no one wants real."
"But I've been real since the silence started answering me back."
The crowd was completely still now.
Phones weren't just down — they were forgotten.
Elias took the next breath with her.
And on the chorus, he joined in.
> "So I wrote it down in case it killed me."
"Every word that I wasn't supposed to sing."
Their voices met in the middle — not harmonized, but woven. Like threads from two different lives that didn't match until they had to.
He didn't look at the crowd.
He just looked at her — the line of her shoulders, the control in her jaw, the tremor she tried to bury in her breath before the bridge.
And something in him shifted.
Something unlocked.