Hey you, it’s Brighton <3 I’ll be the one accompanying you on this little story of ours. Don’t worry, Adam's got you covered for the proposal. Anyways, we begin on a bright and early morning. It’s 8am on UMKC campus and I am strolling up to my first college class ever — I am talking freshman year, first day, first class ever. For those of you that don’t know, I am not anywhere close to a morning person at 8am so you can imagine my mild disdain as a sandy blonde, bright-eyed guy walks up to the large group of us forming outside the classroom. With all the confidence of a man who just won 10 million dollars he says, “Hey guys! My name is Adam Edmonds! What’s everyones name?”. A short pause ensues as our collective brains process the sunshine radiating from his direction. We begin to say our names around the group and it eventually comes to me. I amusedly state my name to which he asks, “Oh, how do you spell that?”. I rattle off the spelling as we all file into the now available classroom. He smiles and boldly asks to sit next to me. He proceeds to interject a quip or question throughout the duration of our very first college class in which I learned absolutely nothing about music. What I did learn is that he played piano and all of a sudden I needed someone to play piano for me.

Hi, it's Adam! So I knew it was time to pop the question; I mean, it had been like almost 8 years together and just about everybody was wondering when we would. But more importantly, it just felt like the right time. We both knew it was. In April '21, we were having one of those perfect days where we had nowhere to be and nothing to do - just milling about. I casually asked if she'd want to go ring shopping and she immediately started crying happy tears and we found THE ring on our first visit to our first shop. Hell, it was the first ring she even tried on that day. Not knowing how soon everything would happen, but knowing that I needed to have that diamond in particular, I snuck away and drove back to the shop to buy it just a few days later. SKIP AHEAD to the actual proposal. It's now May. Brighton has always said she wanted a few specific things at her proposal, so it was now my job to navigate making them all happen for her :) The most important thing was that as many of her friends be there as possible. So that's exactly what we did! We got a whole bunch of folks together and staged a cute picnic party at the Nelson Atkins Museum for her! Now it was a matter of getting her there without raising ANY suspicion. To do this, we staged a fake "styled shoot". A few months back, B and I had worked as Bride and Groom models for a styled shoot for a friend in the wedding industry. I texted this friend and asked her to help stage a second style shoot as an 'excuse' for why we needed to dress up and go to the Nelson. So we got all dressed up, got a very specific parking spot, and walked a very particular path to head towards the picnic. As we walked up the path, B noticed there was a group of people hanging out up ahead. As soon as she knew it was her actual friends, there for her, I stopped her, knelt down, and asked her to be mine for life. I told her how we took a date on the Nelson when we first met. Just barely over 4,000,000 minutes ago to this moment.