They met in Pennsylvania at a wedding. She was the maid of honor and he was an usher. For a full week prior to the wedding, the wedding party stayed together at a rental house. She thought he was cute and purposely asked him to help her with some of the pre-wedding tasks, “which was our first conversation. I remember both of us being shy, but I kept making sure I was around him. I think about that week every time I listen to ‘Mastermind’ because that’s exactly how I felt.”

That wedding week was the start of everything for Kayli and Alex, but he was living in Pennsylvania at the time and she was in Iowa. “We immediately were separated after the wedding and didn’t see each other for two months.” But they spent six straight hours on FaceTime after they both got home from the wedding and Kayli remembers thinking she had never had such an easy time talking to someone before, especially not so quickly after meeting.

Three months after the wedding, in March 2023, Alex flew to Iowa to visit Kayli. “Our first actual date was to the Mississippi River Museum,” Alex says. “I’d say I was operating on a baseline level of nervousness the entire time I was there, but it felt really nice to be going out and doing something, just the two of us, for the first time, especially after only communicating via text/video for three months after meeting.”

Kayli adds, “I remember showing him around the area, going out to dinner, to coffee shops, visiting the museum I loved so much as a child. It was just so incredibly easy to be around him and I wanted to be around him all the time from then on.”

Kayli is a fellow reader and lover of Emily Henry books (we are also both Swifties, dark chocolate lovers, and take large loans from our libraries at every visit) so very early in their relationship, they began talking about taking a trip to Maine (“Happy Place” is set there; iykyk) and they finally decided to take the trip this past May. “I thought it was possible Alex would propose on the trip. (I knew the ring process was moving forward because he had me try on different ring sizes that winter.) However, I was not expecting the proposal on that day it happened.”

“This was a trip we had been talking about taking since we first got together,” Alex says. “So it felt like it’d be a real full circle moment. Going in, I didn’t know exactly when I wanted to propose because I wanted to find the perfect moment without forcing it. One night we went out to dinner,  and I brought the ring with me just in case. We went for a walk along the water after dinner. Kayli looked gorgeous, the sun was setting nicely, and there ended up being a moment where there was nobody else around. I knew right then that it was the right time.”

“We had a pretty relaxing day that day, going on a lobster boat and hanging out at our rental,” Kayli recalls. “We were planning to go out to dinner and get ice cream that evening and I told Alex I wanted to walk along a path I saw from the lobster boat that went along the shoreline. I had always assumed Alex would be super nervous before the proposal, but we had a  normal dinner, so I didn’t suspect that the ring was in his pocket the entire time! After we walked along the shore for a bit, we stopped at a good viewpoint, and no one happened to be around. I commented on how perfect the view was, and Alex said, ‘You know what would be more perfect?’ and he got down on one knee. I cried.”

As we were walking around downtown Iowa City, I said, “Hey Kayli, do you ever go into Prairie Lights to buy books?” Obviously. So we popped in and I asked if they would mind if we took a few photos inside. They didn’t and look at how cute!