The Proposal

It happened on the pedestrian walkway of the Bear Mountain Bridge in late October — which will sound romantic to anyone who wasn’t there for the wind. Noah had been carrying the ring for six weeks, waiting for the perfect moment, and finally accepted that perfect wasn’t coming; windy and freezing and completely ours would have to do. He got about half a sentence in before Leah figured out what was happening and started crying, which made him start crying, and a very kind stranger took the only photo that exists of the whole thing: two people laughing and crying at the same time, 150 feet above the river we’d been crossing together for years. We called our families from the car with the heat on full blast.