I should explain who we are. Terrence and I have been together for nine years. We live in a small craftsman house in East Nashville that we bought in 2022. We are boring, in the sense that most functional couples are boring. We eat the same takeout every Friday. We watch the same murder podcasts. We have an elderly dog named Clementine. We got engaged in September of last year, during a long weekend on the Gulf Coast, and we had spent the month since then slowly telling people. Our anniversary dinner at Pescara was the first "big" dinner we had done since the engagement — it was a restaurant

Terrence had wanted to try for two years, and I had made the reservation six weeks out because the waitlist was notorious, and we had, both of us, been excited about the dinner all week. I want you to understand that context because the tone of the evening from the moment we walked in was so wrong so immediately that I knew, standing at the hostess stand, that something was off. The hostess was friendly. She sat us at a window table. She lit a candle. She said "your server will be right with you." And then a man came to our table — late forties, tall, thin, dark hair — and said, "Drinks." Not "Hi, I'm Brandt." Not "What would you like." Just: drinks.