Ollie pulls away, smiling. “You’re incorrigible.”
“You married me.”
He rolls his eyes but doesn’t disagree.
The small crowd settles onto the bleachers. No screaming arena noise. No blinding lights. Just a couple hundred kids,volunteers, and mentors who’ve seen what this program can do up close.
Miles counts us in softly.
We open with something light. A mid-tempo track from the new album that gets heads nodding and shoulders swaying. The second song is older, one they all know, and Luca absolutely belts the chorus like he’s auditioning for something.
By the time we hit the third song, the energy shifts. I step forward slightly, acoustic strapped on.
“This one’s newer,” I say into the mic. “You’ve probably heard it. But this version’s different.”
The room quiets. Ollie’s standing off to the side now, arms folded loosely, watching.
“‘Mending Hearts,’” I say.
The first chord rings out, softer without full production behind it.
I wrote this one two years ago, in a house in San Francisco with unpacked boxes still lining the hallway after we moved into a new house, a little farther away from the city. It wasn’t about the chaos. It wasn’t about all we’d been through.
It was about what came after.
I sing the first verse slowly, letting the words sit in the air instead of rushing them.
“We were fire in a paper room,
breathing smoke like it was air,
calling damage destiny
like we didn’t know despair.”
There’s a murmur from the kids who know it.
I glance at Ollie on the second line of the chorus.
“You don’t save a heart by running,
you don’t heal it by goodbye,
you mend it in the daylight
where there’s nowhere left to hide.”
His expression changes slightly. He doesn’t look embarrassed anymore when I sing about him. He doesn’t deflect or tease. He just stands there, steady and present.
The second verse hits closer to home.
“We were brave in all the wrong ways,
throwing love against the wall,
thought the fall would break us open,
didn’t know it built us tall.”