Chapter 4: Dear T.

The floor was packed by the second song.

I stood far left at the barrier, in my cracked old shirt, with eight thousand strangers singing around me.

The woman from the plane found me in the crowd and grabbed my arm, screaming.

"You made it! Where's your friend?"

"Not here," I said.

Eli walked out in the same gray cap, with a battered guitar and no band behind him for the first three songs.

He looked across the floor once, quickly, from one side to the other.

When he reached my corner his eyes stopped on my shirt.

He gave the smallest nod, and kept playing.

I do not know how to explain what that did to me.

For two weeks I had been the person standing outside the gate.

Now a man with a spotlight on him had found me in a crowd, and I did not have to say my name.

At the end of the fifth song he set the guitar on its stand.

The room got quiet.

"I've been doing this a long time," Eli said into the mic. "And I've never written anything that wasn't mostly about me."

A few people laughed.

"Then four years ago, letters started coming. Handwritten. Signed with a T."

The whole floor sighed.

"I answered her once, on a postcard, and she never wrote about it again. She just kept writing."

My hands had gone cold on the barrier.

"Tonight she's here," he said. "The label found her. Come out, T."

A spotlight cut across the VIP pit.

Brianna walked out on the stage in a long white dress.

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