The beginning of everything else

Polaris Slingshot

A lot had happened after the wedding. Lee and Rachel had gone on their Honeymoon of course, spending two weeks in the Kauai Beach Resort of Hawaii. On their return, we sat down to their first Family Dinner as a married couple where they showed us hundreds of pictures of the golden beaches, tropical rainforests, and dramatic cliffs as well as the photos taken at the wedding. The hotel looked perfect and they described blissful days on the beach doing nothing as well as activity-packed days where they snorkeled in the ocean, hiked to local waterfalls, and took a sunset dinner onboard a catamaran. The trip sounded perfect, and the happiness, love, and general contentment was evident throughout all of their pictures as well as in the expressions on their faces as they described those two weeks.

The other big news that came out of the wedding had gone unnoticed on the day itself. It wasn't until a week later on the Saturday, whilst Noah and I were Skyping Chloe that I had caught sight of a Chicago Bears hat laying on the table next to her chair. After our discussion when she had come to visit, we had been making an increased effort to stay regularly in touch. There had been something in the way that she had described to me how all of her friends were leaving NYC that had my spidey-sense tingly about at least one of the underlying reasons that she was having trouble letting go of Josh.

Over the weeks between the Bachelorette and the Wedding, she had been making leaps and bounds and had committed to herself to find her next big challenge career-wise, so that she could move out of the city and make a completely fresh start. Of course Noah and I had told her that she was more than welcome to camp out in our guestroom until she was settled if that challenge happened to be in LA, and she said that she would definitely take us up on our offer if that was the avenue that eventually worked out.

All of the way through the conversation, the hat kept firing one of my synaptic nerves, the sensation was similar to deja vu or like a memory just out of reach, and it was near the end of the call when I had gone to grab a stack of Lee and Rachel's wedding photos that everything dropped into place. The reason for the photos was to show her one of the candid shots that the photographer had taken of the three of us posing, Chlo and I on either side of Noah, but mixed in were some photos that I had taken at breakfast the morning after. The picture in question had been of Matthew and his brother both proudly surrounded by their four boys, and it was Noah's cousin Rob, the younger of the two, who was sporting some very familiar headwear.

For a second I was like a deer caught in the headlights, how do I tell Noah without mentioning it out loud with Chloe on the call. If the hat is there on the table, there is a good chance that its owner is there too, but just out of sight. First I try delicately showing him the picture, but he's already seen it and has no idea why I'm trying to show it to him again, so next I prop it up against the laptop and point between the hat in the picture and its twin on the screen. It takes him a moment to realize, but I know he's got it when he mutters "interesting" under his breath, and for a second I think he's going to be subtle about it until I see him smirk and lean back in his chair. 

"Yo Chlo" he says diverting her attention away from what she had just finished telling me about the interviews she has lined up, "can Rob hear us?". Chloe's eyes instantly go wide, and her mouth drops open into a silent O, as the laughter in the background answers his question.

The flight out to Reno the following weekend was pretty uneventful, and we landed just before midday on Friday morning. Noah had suggested a long weekend away from LA to relax and unwind, and booked 3 nights on the South Shore of Lake Tahoe in a hotel that looked simply divine. I remember Noah laughing at me when I had immediately gotten to work googling all of the activities that we could do, telling me that as long as I left Saturday free for hiking, I could book as much as I wanted for the rest of the trip. After picking up our rental, the drive from Reno to our hotel took about an hour and a half, and now we are here in our room collapsed on the enormous bed, grinning at each other like idiots.