Kayla & Anthony

Kayla and Anthony passed each other around campus for a while without either of them thinking much of it. Anthony made a few attempts. They eventually ended up at the same party, and over wings and music and a lot of laughing, it landed.

Not long after, he joined the military, and the two of them spent the next stretch doing long distance: different cities, and handwritten letters through basic training that arrived in whatever order the post felt like delivering them.

What they built after that is made of small repeated things. Long walks. New restaurants, because they take being foodies seriously. R&B, old and new, and concerts that turn into the nights they still reference. Every year Kayla makes an anniversary playlist, so their whole relationship exists as a run of songs. And a good many evenings with a glass of wine and a film and neither of them moving off the couch.

He proposed in St. Maarten. They'd been out for dinner and live music and were back on the hotel balcony making TikToks, and Kayla noticed he'd become strangely particular about the lighting and the camera angle. She was about to say something about it when he got down on one knee.

They wanted modern boho: clean lines, natural texture, earthy tones. What that meant in practice was cream, bone, sand and wood, with gold running through the hardware and a dusty rose warming it up. Pampas, bleached palm fans, white roses and hydrangea. Very little colour and a great deal of texture.

Everything happened in one footprint on Pool Beach at Avila. Ceremony on the sand facing the water, then the same ground became dinner, then it became the dance floor. Thirty-two guests, one view, nobody moving anywhere.

The tables went without linen entirely. Cream cheesecloth runners laid down the wood with a jute runner through the centre, covering about three quarters of the surface and leaving the rest of the farm table showing. Woven placemats, gold flatware, cut glass, and pampas in jars between the candles.

Instead of place cards, each guest found their own menu at their seat with their name on it, fixed through a gold grommet and knotted into the napkin. One object doing two jobs, which turned out to be the theme.

Because almost everything on that beach worked twice. The ceremony flowers came off the arch and went onto the dinner tables. The arch itself moved behind the sweetheart table, so Kayla and Anthony sat in front of it, close enough to the speeches to be part of them. And the draped fabric wall built for the photo booth became the backdrop for the cake, with the neon still lit above it.

The cake carried a small map of the world and a dotted flight path across the upper tier, which is the right cake for two people who spent years measuring their relationship in distance.

Then the DJ, and both of them entirely relaxed, which after everything is the only part that really counts.