Sure enough, three months later on June 1, she met Raymond Meyer at her friend Janet Weisberger’s dinner party. They were married within the year. He was a man worth giving up a job for, Gloria said. They bought an apartment on the Upper East Side within walking distance of Central Park, and he truly didn’t mind that she preferred to spend her days strolling Museum Mile and reading in cafés to keeping the house and preparing hot dinners. She felt vindicated that she had held out for a husband who was smitten with her exactly the way she was. He never wanted to tamp down her sharp tongue or her creative mind.

If the vision had only happened once, she might have written it off as a coincidence. But the images kept coming: she forecasted her brothers and sister meeting their matches, and then a handful of cousins, and her own daughter and son, and then my sister, Rae, and then me.

Gloria has seen it all coming: Her sixty-four-year-old aunt finding true romance with the woman who moved in next door after decades of an unhappy marriage to a man; my cousin Evan kissing a girl on the playground in preschool and marrying her twenty years later; even Rae meeting her boyfriend—soon-to-be fiancé—during her freshman year of college. She’s never been wrong.

Today, Friday, June 24, 2022, is my day. Gloria has known the date since I was a little girl, but didn’t reveal it until I was sixteen and completely crushed that Kyle Washington asked Michaela Francis to homecoming instead of me. She wanted me to know life had more in store for me than just a date to a high school dance. I’ve imagined this day in countless ways over the years: At sixteen, I fantasized about bumping into a beautiful French man on the Pont des Arts, the love lock bridge in Paris; at twenty-two, I dreamed about styling a cover shoot for a magazine and falling for whichever heartthrob celebrity’s pants I was cuffing; at twenty-five, I got honest with myself and figured I’d probably swipe across my future husband on a dating app. But now, at twenty-nine, it seems none of those scenarios was right.