If you really know me, you know I’ve read a few books in my time. Romance novels, mostly. The kind with meet-cutes and grand gestures and tension that makes you flip pages way past your bedtime. But this one, well, it just so happens to be my favorite.

It starts on the MU patio at Arizona State University. There was a spilled iced coffee. A destroyed laptop. There was a very reasonable assumption that this (us) was absolutely not going anywhere.

And yet.

As I walked back to my sorority common room holding my laptop upside down (to drain the coffee, obviously - science), I sent one more message to that guy from Texas:

“You could fly back out here to come to my sorority formal.”

Reader, he booked the flight.

He came back to Arizona. We went to formal. And from that night on, we never really left each other’s sides.

Well… geographically, yes. Emotionally? Not once.

We did long distance between Arizona and Texas. Then Arizona and Wyoming. We FaceTimed through time zones, studied on speakerphone, and built something steady in the in-between. The magic wasn’t flashy, it was patient. It was choosing each other over and over.

We both graduated (one of us early, one of us with an extra lap) and stepped into what people like to call “real life.” Except, our real life has looked a little different, too.

We’ve moved to Montana, California, Wyoming (again… we had unfinished business), Washington, and Utah. We’ve navigated grief, job changes, growing up, growing closer, raising a puppy. We’ve traveled. And we’ve built a home in every place we happened to land.

So when David got down on one knee in Vancouver a few Octobers ago and asked for forever, there wasn’t really a question.

Because somewhere between the spilled coffee and all those miles, this stopped feeling like a collection of chapters. It became my favorite story.

And I can’t wait to keep writing it together.