It was the first night of our vacation. Proposing wasn't the plan. We were tired and congested. The plan was to do it the next night. At the fancy place with the view. But we ended up having a very nice dinner at the hotel that first night. And we said a lot of nice things to each other. Things that made an impromptu proposal make sense. So, we paid for our meal and I discretely ordered a bottle of champagne to the room. On the balcony, with the Tyrrhenian Sea below and the lights of Praiano doing that twinkling thing that they do, I got down on one knee and apparently said the right words. I don't remember what the words were. They just fell out. But she said yes. Then she cried on the floor for a while with a ring on her finger.

We were exhausted. We’d spent the whole day before our flight celebrating Daisy’s 7th birthday and the whole night before our flight in the ER getting her head glued shut. We flew to Italy the next morning, where, on zero sleep, Conor masterfully navigated the hairpin turns of the Amalfi coast for hours. We were grimy and haggard when we finally sat down to eat spaghetti, but we told each other some very real things, and back in our room on our balcony, Conor knelt and said a bunch of things that I bet were also very real and very beautiful, but neither of us can remember. I wept in every corner of the room, drenching everything in big, sloppy weeps. I would marry him.