We’d been dating for nearly three months. The next day was our anniversary, and we were supposed to do something together. I can’t remember what now, but she had some sort of last minute work obligation crop up. She called to tell me she wanted to see me that night. I had hung up the phone maybe five minutes before she arrived. She must have called me on the way. She had nothing in her hands. No present. I was suspicious.

As she closed the door she flashed a naughty grin and opened the trench coat. It’s not an overstatement to say that that moment changed my life. Her slacks stopped shortly above where the coat ended. She’d cut the legs off of a pair of her pants and attached them to a garter belt.

She wore nothing else under the coat.

To say this looked slightly ridiculous wouldn’t be a lie but in that moment I couldn’t care less about how silly she looked. She was gorgeous, full-figured in all the right ways, dark hair, bright eyes. I instantly fell in love with her, head over heels, hopelessly smitten, and all that. I already knew she was smart, funny, kind, and all that other good stuff, but to see this work of genius- these pant legs, concocted to better sell the old naked-under-the-trench-coat gag, knowing how much thought and preparation went into something so completely and utterly silly-I instantly knew that this was the woman for me.

I proposed to her in that very moment. She thought I was joking, of course, but when I did it again two weeks later, properly and with a ring, she accepted. We were married six months later.

We were married four wonderful years before the world around us fell apart. The world as we knew it quickly disappeared, leaving us and everyone else lost without any hope of regaining the lives we’d grown accustomed to. Diane died two weeks after we abandoned our home.