For the first two years that I loved Bennett, I believed I had found the rare thing people spend half their lives searching for and the rest of their lives pretending they do not need. He was a man whose kindness did not feel like a performance or something borrowed from simple good manners to impress a crowd.
Bennett was gentle in the small and unadvertised ways that matter much more than grand gestures once a life begins to be built in the middle of ordinary days. He remembered tiny details that I mentioned only once and then forgot myself, such as how I preferred my coffee with a single drop of cream and no sugar.
He always noticed when I was tired before I even had the chance to say it, and he would press his warm palm against the back of my neck while I stood at the stove. It was a quiet touch that made me feel truly seen rather than managed, and it gave me the strength to handle the long hours at the bank.
When we crossed the busy streets of Richmond, he reached for my hand with the absent certainty of a person who wanted the whole world to know exactly who he belonged beside. I had not grown up to be a foolish woman because my mother had worked too hard and loved too clearly for foolishness to survive for very long in our house.
There is a significant difference between foolishness and faith, and at twenty eight years old, I still had enough faith in life to believe that a steady man could be trusted. Bennett seemed like a solid anchor because he listened closely when I spoke and laughed with his whole face whenever I told a joke.
He never made me feel dramatic for caring deeply about my work or my family, and he always encouraged me to pursue the things that made me happy. When he proposed to me while kneeling in the small Italian restaurant where we had eaten our first meal together, his voice shook so badly that I began crying before the ring was even visible.
The waiter had to bring extra napkins to our table because we were both such a mess of happy tears and whispered promises. Both of our mothers cried at the engagement dinner, though I realized much later that they were crying for very different reasons.
My mother, Rose, cried with a sense of deep gratitude that her daughter had found a partner who seemed to cherish her. Bennett’s mother, Margaret, cried with a sense of satisfaction that felt more like a mission had been accomplished.
