Lauren was thirty-one, bright, socially confident, and much quicker with words than I was. She worked in marketing for a growing regional company and had an instinct for reading an audience before she spoke. At parties, she could make a stranger feel like an old friend in ten minutes, and when somebody told a story badly, she could retell it with better timing and have the whole table laughing. I admired that ease because I had never possessed it. I tended to think before I answered, sometimes for so long that Lauren accused me of conducting an internal audit on every conversation.
We had met through mutual friends at a brewery fundraiser on a Saturday afternoon. I remember her taking a paper napkin from the counter because the table was uneven, folding it into a precise square, and sliding it under the short leg without interrupting the story she was telling. When she noticed me watching, she smiled and asked whether the engineer in me approved of her repair. I told her I wasn't an engineer, which made her laugh, and she said that was exactly the kind of correction an engineer would make. I took her out for tacos the following week, and for a while everything between us felt wonderfully uncomplicated.
Her parents lived in Colorado Springs, and mine were in Fort Collins. We took turns visiting both families, making the drive with coffee in the cup holders and music low enough that we could talk. My mother liked Lauren immediately because Lauren remembered birthdays, arrived with flowers, and volunteered to wash dishes when nobody asked. Her father, a quiet man named Robert, shook my hand after our second visit and told me that Lauren could be stubborn but had a generous heart. At the time I heard the compliment more clearly than the warning.
I don't want to pretend the entire relationship was a disaster waiting to happen. There were years of real affection inside it, and I would be dishonest if I erased them because of how things ended. Lauren sat with me during the week my father was hospitalized for pneumonia, even after her manager complained about a missed client meeting. I drove her to an urgent-care clinic during a winter snowstorm when she developed a fever that frightened her. We celebrated promotions, carried each other through discouraging days, and talked seriously about having a family when the time was right.
When I proposed, we were standing beside a lake at sunset on a weekend trip into the mountains. I had rehearsed a speech and forgotten nearly all of it when she turned around and saw the ring. She cried, I laughed because I was nervous, and