OUT OF TRAGEDY, LOVE
It was the last night of the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, and Austin Monfort and Chantal Melanson were pushing toward the stage to catch a glimpse of the day’s big act: Jason Aldean. The pair had crossed paths the night before at a Vegas bar, but Chantal, 27, a prison administrator from Canada, and Austin, a 22-year-old California college student, were still trying to figure out if they were into each other as they stood on the asphalt festival grounds, pressed closely together by the 20,000 country music fans. As Aldean launched into his ballad, ‘When She Says Baby’, Chantal thought she heard fireworks. “I didn’t think anything of it,” she says. “At a
