He was the boy who returned my library books when I forgot. I was the girl who saved him a seat at lunch even when the table filled up fast. When Danny Ferris made fun of my crooked front teeth in sixth grade, Matthew didn’t say a word — he just stood behind my chair for the rest of the week like a small, silent bodyguard, until Danny got bored and moved on.
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.
I hadn’t walked on. I’d taken a photo of the price tag with my phone, done the math three separate times, and started quietly setting money aside.
