From the Shadows to the Stage

Elena Reed and Ethan Stone met at the bottom, each of them already half destroyed by what had happened to them. Ethan had been wronged, and the case against him had been left to rot. Elena took it up herself and went after the people responsible with a hardness nobody expected from her, dragging the matter back into the open until he got his name cleared. He gave her the other half of the arrangement: money when she had none, a place to sleep, someone standing at the back of every room she sang in. He burned through everything he had to keep her moving. Years pass and Elena is a singer with her name on an arena, playing to a crowd of ten thousand. Ethan stays where he has always stayed, in the dark at the edge of it, still convinced he is the wrong sort of man to be standing next to her. At the end of the show she walks out into the follow spot, holds out her hand toward him and says, "If you won't walk toward me, I'll walk toward you."