Chapter One
Our love story started long before Matthew and
I ever actually met.
And when you think about it, most love stories
start that way. Every moment leading up to the
one in which you meet your future husband or
wife somehow shapes you and prepares you for
that person you were fated for. Any previous
heartbreaks or dark days or lonely nights can be
crucially important in the grand scheme of
things—sometimes we need to know what
something feels like when it’s wrong before we
can ever really know it when another thing is
RIGHT.
So that’s why I need to start the story with a
little bit of background. The whole “girl meets
boy, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl get
married” model is a little too simplistic for my
needs. You people want details, don’t you? Of
course you do.
When I was 18 years old and working as a
waitress at a little family restaurant, I met a guy
who was 10 years older than me. He was the
one who came before Matthew. We dated for
three and half years, and even lived together
during the last year and half of that relationship.
We moved into a tiny little house and owned
Gracie and Cooper together and our relationship
was never a terrible one. He was a good guy, I
was a good girl, and we really did love each
other.
But for every moment of those three and a half
years, I had a nagging, itching, aching feeling
that he would never be the right one for me.
Despite his great heart, he lacked ambition and
drive and handled his finances very poorly and,
at the heart of it all, was very insecure despite
being a bright and attractive guy. I understood
him, though. I understood that his family had
never prepared him for LIFE, and the poor
decisions he had made as a younger man had
him caught in a sticky web and a hole he just
couldn’t seem to dig himself out of.
As the years went by, he could give me less and
less of what I needed. Things became strained
between us. I was a terrible nag, and I see that
now. But the problem was that there were just
too many things about him that I wanted to
change. And as I began to realize that I could
never change him and shouldn’t have to, I
struggled SO much with what the right thing to
do was. It ate away at me day and night,
because I honestly couldn’t imagine my life
without him. And being alone TERRIFIED me.
Somewhere during all this, I read the book The
Secret which is all about the law of attraction. I
really, really believed in what it said. It inspired
me. I realized that I had not arranged my life in
a way that allowed for all the things I so
desired. I hate to skim over this because it’s so
important, but let’s just say that I KNEW I had
to decide what I wanted my future to look like
and start taking active steps towards attracting
that future. And staying in my current
relationship at the time was a major roadblock. I
knew in my heart that if I stayed where I was,
life would always be a struggle.
So one day the breakup finally happened. We
talked and cried for hours and finally decided
that we could never truly work. He decided to
move out and let me stay in the house and
keep the dogs because, on his income alone, he
couldn’t afford to live there (I made enough
waiting tables to cover the bills if pennies were
tightly pinched).
I can honestly say that the 48 hours after that
break up were the toughest of all my life. I
ugly-cried those kind of tears that come from
somewhere inside you didn’t even know existed
—a place of fear and sudden awareness that
you are completely alone.
And that’s the place I was in when I met
Matthew. We met a mere 48 hours after the ex
and I called it quits, which could either be
considered really terrible timing or really great
timing. I choose to believe the timing was
perfect.
But let’s back up again for just a minute.
Remember how I was working at that little
restaurant? Well, for a couple of years I’d been
waiting on my future in-laws without even
knowing it. We’ll just call them Mr. and Mrs. D
for our purposes here today.
They were an odd couple. Mrs. D was a
beautiful blonde and friendly as can be, and Mr.
D was quiet, reserved, and hard to read. I really
enjoyed waiting on them, though, and I found it
amusing when Mrs. D would occasionally
mention their son in California and how perfect
he and I would be for each other. She
mentioned this to me on at least two or three
occasions, but I always laughed and just politely
reminded her that I had a boyfriend. I came to
find out later that, in actuality, Mrs. D talked a
whole lot more about Matthew and I one day
meeting than I ever knew at the time; Mr. D
now says he had to hear about it every single
time they came to the restaurant, and Matthew,
when he was in town, would always go to eat
there and would hear about me then, too. But
for some reason, I was never working when
Matthew happened to stop in with his parents,
and our paths never crossed.
But then one day, on January 19, 2009, our
paths DID cross. And to make it all the more
strange, I wasn’t even working that day—the
encounter was, TRULY, by chance.
Little did I know when I woke up that morning,
Martin Luther King Day and a university holiday,
that my life was about to be turned upside
down.