Everyone on our street joked that we’d get married one day. We used to roll our eyes at that. And then, somewhere between junior prom and college move-in day, the joke quietly stopped being a joke.
He proposed the week after graduation, on the same porch steps where we used to do algebra homework, holding a ring he’d clearly bought with money he didn’t have. I said yes before he finished the sentence. He laughed and told me to let him finish next time. I never did.
Five years later, we had a narrow blue house four streets from the one I grew up in, a mortgage we were slowly figuring out, and a marriage that still felt, most days, like the easiest thing either of us had ever done.
Our fifth anniversary was three weeks away, and I wanted to do something bigger than usual. Matthew had a habit of admiring things out loud and never buying them for himself — a habit I found unbearably endearing and slightly infuriating. Months earlier, we’d walked past a jewelry store downtown and he’d stopped at the window, tapping the glass over a steel-and-navy watch like he was greeting an old friend, then walked on without a word, the way he always did.
