Nicole and Nathan first met at Villa Park High School in Orange, California, when a science teacher and a red bucket unknowingly set everything in motion. Nathan was a year older, and as Mrs. Writer passed around a bucket filled with names to choose lab partners, Nicole remembers thinking, Please don’t let me get him. He’s older. Of course, she reached in and pulled out Nathan Sammons. He became her lab partner, and somewhere between science class, school dances and handwritten letters, their story began. Life eventually took them in very different directions. Nicole stayed closely connected to the place they grew up, building a career in marketing and brand development and even found her way back to Villa Park High School as a teacher for a short time. Nathan chose a life of adventure, with his career in the United States Coast Guard taking him across the country and around the world. Through the years, however, they never seemed to disappear completely from one another’s lives. Then, during the pandemic, while Nathan was stationed halfway around the world in Guam, a What'sApp message turned into a conversation, conversations became something more, and when he finally came home, they decided to find out where all those years of finding their way back to one another might lead. Their first drink was at Capri in Orange, and this time, it stuck. Over the next five years, they built a life together filled with the big moments and, even better, all the wonderfully ordinary ones: dirty martinis at the Tartan Room, casual dinners at Pancho’s, Angels games, concerts and nights out, the Orange International Street Fair every year, and Del Taco breakfasts with donuts and coffee in the morning news. They’ve gone back to Villa Park for a Homecoming game, pulled out old letters and laughed about school dances and the two teenagers who had no idea where their story would eventually take them. Five years after finding their way back to each other, Nathan proposed at the fountain in the Orange Circle. And now, nearly three decades after a red bucket randomly paired two students in a science class, they’ll be married in the heart of Old Towne Orange, just minutes from where it all began, surrounded by the people who have become part of their story along the way. Their lives have taken them in different directions, across years and even around the world, but somehow, they always led back to each other, and back home.