Page 37 of Anything But Lonely

Every scream, every chant, every impatient clap winds tighter beneath my skin until my pulse starts keeping time with theirs. By the time the stage manager gives me the signal, the anticipation is so sharp it feels less like nerves and more like being loaded into the chamber of a gun.

The house lights drop, and the roar that crashes over the stage hits me like a second heartbeat. Eddie clicks his drumsticks together three times, just like he’s always done, and Theo’s guitar riff cuts through the air.

The voices in the crowd find the tempo before I do, thousands of strangers breathing and moving as one until the music stops feeling like something we're playing and starts feeling like something we're all caught inside.

When Silas comes in with the bass, the sound we’ve perfected over the last two decades surrounds me, like an embrace from an old friend, the lyrics flowing through me like the oxygen I breathe.

By the time I step into the first chorus, the crowd is carrying half the weight with me, turning every note bigger, louder, and somehow more alive than it ever was in the studio.

The nerves melt away as I sink into this feeling—a feeling I never want to forget.

The feeling I know I’ll have to say goodbye to in a matter of months.

I look to the side of the stage, just beyond the curtain, and I find Crew in his Halloween pajamas, big headphones over his ears. He’s holding Emerson’s hand as he bounces along with the beat. His lips are moving, singing along with Daddy, just like he told me he would before we went on stage.

My eyes find Emerson, her face stoic as she watches from the curtain; the only tell that she’s enjoying the show is the slight sway of her head as she looks down at Crew, smiling down at him as he lets go of her hand to pretend to play guitar, just like Theo showed him earlier tonight when we were all hanging out in the greenroom.

I haven’t had a chance to talk to Emerson alone, but I won’t be able to move on from what happened at soundcheck this morning until I apologize to her—but I can barely look her in the eye after getting off to the thought of her.

The guys have been giving me a hard time about my nanny since I got back to the venue this afternoon, and thank fuck they finally stopped when Emerson arrived with Crew.

Since this show started about an hour before Crew’s bedtime, he gets to be here for the first half of our setlist, and while this crowd is something special, there’s nothing better than having my son here.

As our first song fades into our second, the mask of confidence that has come to fit me so well has muscle memory taking over as I work the crowd, feeling more and more like I’m meant to be here as I see all of the people singing along to our songs.

While Eddie is the songwriter of the group, he has been from the very beginning; it’s always been my job to make them ours. To take the words he scribbles onto a page and breathe enough life into them that they stop belonging to him, stop belonging to me, and start belonging to every person screaming them back at us.

The song isn't finished when it's written—it isn't even finished when it's recorded. It's finished when I can stand in front of thousands of people and convince them it was written for them.

Every night, I hand the songs over to the crowd, and if I do my job right, they hand them back louder than we ever could.

It’s what I’ve been trying to teach Liam and his band, and it’s what I wish someone would’ve taught me back when Cross My Heart was just starting out.

Our music isn’t really ours—it’s theirs. It belongs to the people in the crowd who can't quite put their feelings into words, so they borrow ours instead, singing loud enough to finally let themselves feel everything that's too scary to face alone. They can find it in the chorus and scream it until it feels like their own, surrounded by people doing the same.

I don’t know if Emerson is a Cross My Heart fan—and until tonight, I couldn’t tell you if she even liked our music. But when my eyes, almost instinctively, go to her and Crew again, I see her lips moving in time with mine, moving her mouth just barely, but enough for me to see she knows every word.

The last chord fades, the venue silent for no more than a second before a rush of screams and cheers erupts.

“You all having a good time tonight?” I say into my microphone, giving us a moment to breathe before we dive headfirst into our next song.

The crowd erupts in cheers, and it feels like the ground is shaking beneath me.

I smile wide, wiping the beads of sweat on my forehead with the back of my hand. “I’ll take that as a yes.” I take a quick sip of water, setting the bottle back down next to my mic stand before continuing, “As some of you may know, we are Cross My Heart.” More cheers, enough to have me laughing in disbelief, still not sure if this is all just a dream I’ll wake up from one of these days. “And we are honored to be with you all tonight.”

Silas chimes in, asking the crowd if they’re ready for our next song, and they go wild.

Our third song in tonight’s setlist is one of our most popular, and it’s the one we did at soundcheck today. It’s a song that we released a few years ago, back when my sister was still our photographer and before all the marriages and babies that followed.

Back when we didn’t know what the future held, Eddie came out of nowhere with a song that was just enough us but also something new.

The lyrics reminded me of a loss I hadn’t thought about in years. Losing my parents at eighteen, becoming my sister’s guardian, fighting through grief while learning how to keep an eight-year-old little girl alive, truly felt like it was enough to end me.

But I got through it—with Mia, with my band, with our music.

And every time we sing this song, I hope it helps someone like it has helped me.

The lights disappear the second the first chord hits.