It was a little bit of all of that and something far bigger than all of that. How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It’s more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you’d never before been.

Home. When you weren’t sure you’d ever get to have one.

That’s what he was to me. That’s who he was.

Owen pulled my palm to his lips, held me there. “So… are you going to answer my question about how it feels?” he said. “To be a married woman?”

I shrugged. “Not sure yet,” I said. “Too soon to tell.”

He laughed. “Okay, well, that’s all right,” he said.

I took a sip of my champagne. I took a sip, and laughed too. I couldn’t help it. I was happy. I was just… happy.

“Turns out you have a little while to decide,” he said.

“Like the rest of our lives?” I said.

“I hope longer than that,” he said.

If You Marry the Prom King…

Seventy-three names, fifty of them men.

One of them is potentially Owen.

We walk quickly across campus toward the main research library, which Cheryl tells us is most likely to house the school yearbooks. If we can get our hands on the yearbooks from the years Owen was at UT, that could be the key to getting through this list as quickly as possible. The yearbooks will offer not just student names, but they’ll offer photographs too. They’ll potentially have a photograph of a young Owen, if he did anything at school besides fail math.

We head inside the Perry-Castañeda Library, which is enormous—six stories of books and maps and cards and computer labs—and head to the research librarian’s desk. She informs us that we will need to put a request in at the archives to get the hard copies of the school yearbooks from that far back, but we can access the archive on a library computer.