Long before there was a proposal on a Hawaiian beach, there was a high school stage.
Laura and Nick met as teenagers, two halves of the same school productions — Nick on stage as the actor, Laura behind it as the artist, designing the sets. Somewhere along the way they modeled together, too. (There were, they swear, dozens of photos from those days. Between the two of them, exactly one has survived.) They were young and the world was wide, and like so many first chapters, theirs closed with a quiet to be continued. Then graduation came, life pulled them apart, and the years filled in around them — Nick went on to have four kids, and Laura adopted an adorable cavapoo who rarely leaves her side.
Decades later, a chance encounter with a mutual friend pulled them back into each other's orbit, and this time the timing was right. For Nick, it was the girl from the school play, found again; for Laura, it was the person who had somehow always felt like home. They picked up not where they'd left off, but somewhere better — two people who finally knew exactly who they were. For a couple of years they were simply friends, until the day they both admitted what everyone around them had already guessed. The moment they started dating, they were inseparable.
This past June, they slipped away to Hawaii for Laura's birthday. On the evening of the sixth, Nick had planned a private dinner on the sand — and there, with the ocean behind them and her grandmother's ring in hand, he asked. He'd already gone to her parents for their blessing, so all that was left was the question itself. For Laura, there was no hesitation — only the easiest yes she'd ever said.
Now, all these years after that first stage, they're inviting the people they love to the banks of the Niagara River — to begin the rest of it, together.
