We’re at a dimly lit restaurant, the kind 30-somethings swap for the clubs of their 20. Across from me and my husband, Greg, sit potential new friends we met in the hallway at our son’s daycare.

After enough stop-and-chats at pickup, we figured it was time – dinner on a balmy Saturday night in the thick of a hot Chicago summer.

We’re halfway through appetisers when the other wife asks, “So, how did you two meet?”

It’s a classic first-date-with-potential-friends question. Poor thing, she has no idea what she’s stepped into.

For most people, the “how we met” story is a gift, one of a couple’s greatest hits, perfect fodder for an evening with new friends. But Greg and I have a different kind of story. That’s why he nudges me under the table, our code to tell the simple version. To be fair, he thinks he looks worse in the story than I do. I disagree. But I’ll let you be the judge.

“Oh, we met through a mutual friend,” I say.

It’s true. Technically.

Adam was our mutual friend. It’s just not the whole truth.

The wife isn’t buying it. She tilts her head, eyes narrowing as she glances at her husband.

“Really?” she says. “You look like you have a story.”

Those looks are anxiety and hesitation. She’s not wrong. We do have a story.

Greg shoots me a tight, uneasy smile.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think either of us comes off looking bad. It’s just that telling it feels a lot like getting naked in front of someone you just met. And while I’m weirdly used to that feeling – metaphorically, I mean – Greg is not.

I’ve lost a lot of people for someone my age. After a while, vulnerability becomes muscle memory. I’m basically an emotional nudist at this point.

More than anything, I feel like we owe the story to Adam – like his legacy demands it. Otherwise, the parts of him that remain – his stories and the love he left behind – they evaporate. And he’s already so gone. The least we can do is keep his thread alive in how we met. Greg knows that, which is why he lets me begin.

“I knew it,” the wife says, excited now. “Come on, tell us the real story. We can handle it.”

Here’s another thing: the more someone insists they can handle something, the less they actually can. That’s not confidence. It’s anxiety pretending to be confidence. I know this because my anxiety does this all the time.

“Can you?” Greg asks, half-joking. Even her insistence tells me she probably can’t. But I’m already halfway in, so I begin.

“I used to date Greg’s best friend, Adam.”

Her smile falters.

“Oh my God, what a scandal,” she says, trying to play it light.

And this is the part where she’s absolutely going to feel like an asshole.

“Well… not exactly. Adam died. He had an undetected heart condition,” I say. “We started dating after he passed.”

The wife looks like she might throw up.

The husband mutters, “Oh my God.”

I don’t blame them. It’s a lot. Most people aren’t prepared for this plot twist with their burrata.

“It’s OK,” I say, gently.

Greg adds, “It’d be a normal story if we were in a nursing home.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Very on-brand for your 70s. Less so at 26.”

The full backstory is that I first met Greg on Halloween 2013, though I wasn’t looking for him. I was on a street corner in Chicago dressed as Aziz Ansari, already tipsy, already confused. I’d been Instagram-stalking Greg’s best friend, Adam, who had piqued my interest. We had mutual friends from college, and he was always photographed with a cup of coffee and a far-off look, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

Greg showed up in a lot of Adam’s posts, so when I ran into him that night, the first thing I said was, “Hey, where’s Adam?” Greg, having never met me, let alone me dressed as Aziz Ansari, responded with something like, “Who and what are you?” I introduced myself. He drunkenly wandered away.

I didn’t end up finding Adam that night, but we connected not long after. We started texting, then emailing, and eventually we started dating about three months later. We were together for three and a half years.

Greg was a fixture in our world – wild, entrepreneurial, energy abounding. Adam loved him, so I did too. Over the years, we double-dated plenty, and I watched Greg move in and out of relationships.

A few months before Adam died, Greg moved abroad to start a travel company. He had flown back for a friend’s wedding, which we were all attending together. That same week, Adam had a health scare, something like a seizure, but the doctors couldn’t explain it. That’s the thing about being young and seemingly healthy. No one checks your heart.

The afternoon before the ceremony, Greg and I had some alone time while Adam was visiting a friend. I told him how worried I was about Adam. He reassured me that Adam was probably fine, because most 27-year-olds are.

I have only two photos from that weekend. One is a picture Adam took of me on the phone. The other is one he took of Greg and me holding hands. Adam had made us pose together. It made him laugh to think of us as a couple.

Two months later, Adam died.

Greg flew in for the funeral, along with every other person who had ever known or even brushed past Adam. Greg stood by my side the entire time. I think this is probably the part where Greg thinks he looks bad, like it was his plan all along, or he was trying to be, as Bette Midler sang, The Wind Beneath My Wings. But it wasn’t like that. Nothing felt premeditated; it was natural.

He was there when my knees gave way at the burial, putting a hand on my shoulder. At the shiva, as well-meaning mourners swarmed, Greg graciously offered me a Xanax (which I desperately needed). Later, once the dust had somewhat settled, he suggested I might need to get away.

I was in grad school at the time, training to become a therapist, arguably the worst possible setting for a loss. Greg invited me to visit him and another friend in Buenos Aires over spring break. With nothing tethering me to the present, I said yes. That trip became the only thing I looked forward to. In the months before I left, I grieved, unravelling a life I’d built with Adam and still reeling from losing my mom a few years earlier. I was drowning.

Greg called me every day. He made sure I was eating, drinking water and going to class. His voice kept me afloat. But if you’d asked me then, I’d have said, “He’s like a brother to me.” (Side note: If you ever describe someone as “like a brother,” there’s a good chance you’re going to sleep with them. That’s the plot of every romantic movie, but I was too far gone to recognise it.)

When spring break finally came, I found out our other friend couldn’t make it right away. It would just be Greg and me for a few days. That’s when I got nervous. But I got on the plane anyway.

I landed in Buenos Aires around 10pm, barely breathing. When I got to Greg’s apartment, I found him waiting on the corner of his quiet street in the darkness of the Argentine fall. After a quick shower, he took me to a loud bar. We were both awkward, so to quell the awkwardness, we each ordered two drinks. We talked about Adam. About travelling. About everything. My grief loosened its grip just a little.

Later, back at his apartment, we both cried. At some point, I started eating rice cakes, and then I remember getting my computer to put on some music.

Neither of us remembers who made the first move, but I’m pretty sure it was Greg. And that’s how we started dating.

The couple across from us sits in stunned silence. Greg clears his throat and asks, “So… how did you two meet?” They answer, in unison, “Hinge.”

I smile faintly. There’s something I feel in that moment that isn’t exactly jealousy, but it’s close – an awareness of the simplicity of their story. A clean beginning, uncomplicated by loss. A simple story for a party that doesn’t cause any eyebrows to raise or mouths to go agape or leave you feeling like you’re in the emotional nude.

Greg and I don’t have that story. We crashed into each other in the wreckage of something devastating and built something out of the rubble. Our path wasn’t perfect. People were hurt. There were complicated feelings about us being together, and it was absolutely not love at first sight. It took grief, time, Buenos Aires, and a man who called me every day just to make sure I was still getting out of bed every morning.

In the 10 years since, I’ve come to understand that the messiness is what makes our relationship work. There’s a rare honesty between us – an authenticity that comes from having met each other at our most undone.

When you fall in love in the rubble, you don’t get to perform the beginning; you just have to be yourself. There was never any doubt that Greg could support me at my worst; after all, we started there. And the willingness to tell the real version of how we fell for each other is its own kind of love story for Adam, and I want us to tell it because we’ll always be indebted to our dear mutual friend.

Nicole Garelick is a San Francisco-based writer and creator of The Performance Plan, a Substack newsletter about the comedy of getting life wrong. Her writing has appeared in Hey Alma, Spread the Jelly, and Katie Couric Media. She lives with her husband and two young kids, who give her a lot of material. She is represented by Jennifer Simpson at CAA.

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