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W e have our dream wedding, and it is everything we hoped it would be and more.

The hockey season continues, and there are games we win and games we lose. But the losses don’t sting quite as much as they once did. Not when the most important thing in my life now is my beautiful wife and our life together.

Truly, I can’t imagine things getting any better.

I feel like I’m at the top.

But then one day in March, Claire tells me she’s pregnant. We weren’t actively trying, but we weren’t doing anything to prevent it either. We figured if it happens, it happens.

I was hoping it would, and I think Claire was too.

And now it has.

Fuck, I am so excited!

I thought I’d reached the top, but now I’m at an even higher level of happiness.

How could life get any better now?

But it does—the day our daughter is born.

I discover a whole new level of joy, one I never dreamed possible.

Man, that little girl is perfection.

And so is our son when he’s born two years later.

And our second daughter, whom we name Lydia, born just last week.

I think back to all those years ago and the walk I was taking with Claire when she asked me if I’d marry her when she turned twenty-seven. That is, if we were both still single.

I said “yes,” of course.

And you know what? It was never about helping her get her trust fund. I know now that I loved her way back then.

She’s since told me that she’s always loved me too.

It just took us ten years to figure it out.

Ha!

But the important thing is that we did.

Yeah, from two little kids meeting in the neighborhood, to becoming best friends in our teenage years, to falling in love back then but being too scared to recognize it, to moving away and drifting apart, to reuniting and getting married as a fulfillment of a promise, to falling in love all over again and marrying once more, this time for love, to having our kids and creating a beautiful life.

From where we’ve been to where we are.

Some things in life are meant to be, and nothing can stop it.

And that is the story of me and Claire.

Up next in this new Glacier Hockey romance series of interconnected standalones is book 2— Lennox —releasing October 2025!