Some love stories are born in a single instant. Ours began softly, in the spaces between years. Since middle school, our lives drifted near each other, but never crossed. We shared towns, hallways, and hidden intersections of fate, yet we remained strangers, held apart until destiny deemed us ready. Through the years that followed, we passed through the same places, the same people, the same seasons, unknowingly orbiting closer and closer. One Sunday I took a seat beside someone I didn’t yet know, unaware that fate often speaks in small, unassuming moments. In the middle of the crowded breakfast surrounded by friends of friends he dropped a piece of hashbrown that brushed the nose of my service dog, Kaz, before falling to the floor. Kaz remained perfectly still, and he looked at him with genuine admiration. Our first conversation began over that fallen hashbrown, as though fate had nudged us with a playful hand. And just like that, two lives long intertwined but never aligned finally clicked into place—quietly, irrevocably, beautifully. Because the time was, at last, right.