The first time the wind was knocked out of her lungs, she was seven years old falling down the stairs of her family’s new house in Sarasota Springs. The second time happened twenty years later backstage at a sold-out show in Midtown Manhattan. One second she was sitting at her dressing table while her band prepared for the show, and the next something invisible crushed the air from her chest so violently she couldn’t breathe. Suddenly she wasn’t backstage anymore. She was twenty-two again, standing in the middle of a dimly lit 7/11 parking lot while Robby Reynolds glared at her beneath flickering neon lights. “You can’t just leave,” her younger self shouted through tears. Robby looked exhausted, hollowed out by years of addiction and self-destruction. He had sold nearly everything he owned and bought a one-way ticket to Malaysia leaving in a few hours. No plan. No money. Just distance. “You always think you can save me,” he spat when she begged him to stay. Then came the cruelty. He told her she was pathetic for wasting years trying to fix somebody who was always going to be broken. Even then, she knew he didn’t fully mean it. Robby had always pushed people away before they could leave him first. Still, she snapped too. “You’re exactly like your father,” she hissed. His expression cracked for only a second before the wall came back up. “Yeah,” he muttered coldly. “Maybe I am.” He turned toward the airport bus while she screamed after him through tears, suddenly realizing she was no longer inside the memory but watching it. “Don’t let him go,” she begged helplessly. But memories couldn’t be changed. When she opened her eyes again, she was lying backstage surrounded by chaos. Crew members cried while televisions blared reports about people across the world suddenly reliving traumatic memories. Then she looked up and saw him standing behind a government podium onscreen. Robby. Older now. Cleaner. Alive. For years she’d convinced herself he was dead. The shock nearly knocked her flat again. She met Robby when she was seven years old after moving to Florida from Virginia. She fell in love with him slowly through shared bus rides, scraped knees, and quiet afternoons spent hiding from the world together. But even as children she understood there was sadness living inside him. Robby grew up trapped in an abusive home ruled by his father’s drinking and violence. Her family tried to help where they could, letting him spend more time at their house than his own, but eventually he always had to go back home. After a serious car accident at thirteen left him injured, doctors prescribed painkillers during his recovery. One night he admitted to her quietly, “The pills make everything stop hurting.” At first she thought he meant the physical pain. Later she realized he meant all of it. The fear, the anxiety, the constant dread of home. Over the next few years she watched him disappear piece by piece. He skipped school, vanished for days at a time, and slowly became somebody she barely recognized. Meanwhile she threw herself into songwriting and performing, eventually building a growing online following that turned into a real music career. They kept finding each other again over the years in brief, messy reunions that always ended the same way — with addiction pulling him away from her again. At eighteen, after one of her songs went viral, Robby overdosed alone in his apartment and was later arrested for possession. Sitting across from her behind county jail glass, he apologized softly before telling her he couldn’t come with her when she begged him to leave town and start over. That was the closest he ever came to admitting he loved her too. Years later, after her career exploded into sold-out tours and magazine interviews, she ran into him again during a trip home. For a few hours things almost felt normal as they walked along the beach together beneath the stars. Then he admitted he was leaving for Malaysia in only a few hours. The fight that followed destroyed whatever remained between them. She accused him of throwing his life away. He accused her of loving broken people because it made her feel needed. Then he boarded the airport bus and disappeared from her life completely. Now, staring at the television backstage in Manhattan, she couldn’t stop shaking as reporters shouted questions at the man she thought she’d lost forever. Despite everything — the addiction, the years apart, the cruel final fight — seeing Robby again made her feel exactly like the lonely little girl who met the broken boy next door and loved him long before she understood what that would cost her.