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feel guiltier because she wanted all of that supposedly antiquated nonsense?
    “Fuck. What am I supposed to say?” Bronte murmured.
    “You’re supposed to say, ‘I’m not quitting my job and leaving New York until he goes to Harry-Fucking-Winston and rains rose petals down on Mercer Street outside this office window that spell out “will you marry me”… in fucking italics!’ That’s what you’re supposed to say. But—”
    Bronte couldn’t help laughing. Carol smiled across the desk and softened her tone, picking up a pencil and holding an end in each hand as she rotated it distractedly.
    “Look, Bron. I know you think I’m some dried-up old bitch from Sex and the City , but I promise you I want what’s best for you and”—Carol held up one hand to stop Bronte from interrupting—“and… I know that what you want for you is not what I would choose for me. I mean, I am not waiting for anyone—ever!—to spell out anything in rose petals, but I know you have that dreamy, romantic, blissed-out side of you that is waiting for prince charming… that is perfectly entitled to that… but I just don’t think Mr. Texas is your man.”
    Bronte sighed, audibly this time. “It’s hard enough for me to convince myself to leave all this behind, much less convince you, my mom, my friends, and my landlord, but unless I move there, how will I ever know if he’s the one?”
    Carol did her best cynical stare, then dropped the pencil on her desk and raised her palms in an I-give-up gesture.
    “I gather that is not a rhetorical question? Off you go then. What more can I say? I don’t ever want to say ‘I told you so,’ but if nothing else, this is going to teach you one very good lesson.”
    “And what lesson would that be?” Bronte asked skeptically.
    “Oh, just you wait and see.”
    Bronte forcibly ignored the ominous reverberation that followed Carol’s pronouncement.
    After packing up her New York apartment and transferring the lease to a friend of a friend (it’s amazing how easily a perfectly good life disassembles), the movers arrived and shipped the contents of said life to an apartment across the street from his apartment. This was one more layer of her idiocy: the thought that if she got her own place, she wasn’t really moving there just for him, but to have some new, important life experience too.
    Crap. Double crap.
    After saying all the cheerful, tearful, I-hope-I-am-not-making-a-complete-cake-of-myself farewells to friends and family, Bronte hopped a flight to Chicago and then: The Bag Incident.
    The Bag Incident transpired thusly.
    Having just disassembled said pretty-perfect New York City life and made the great sacrifices of quitting job and leaving family and friends, but still feeling pretty heroic and grand-gestureish about the whole thing, Bronte landed at Chicago O’Hare airport. She made it through to baggage claim and, not seeing the promised welcome wagon of Mr. Texas anywhere in sight, set about the awkward task of hauling her bag off the luggage carousel.
    It was an enormous, army-green duffel bag—looking back, it kind of screamed refugee —that was stuffed to bursting with every last-minute thing that had not made it into the final boxes that she’d shipped the week before. Then she turned and he was there—her big, brawny, blond dream, waiting for her, right across the security barricade and just outside baggage claim.
    How sweet was that? Coming to the airport? He didn’t need to do that in the middle of a busy workday, right? So Bronte dragged the massive duffel over to where he was standing, dropped the body bag on the ground with a thud, reached up to hug said dreamboat, and was greeted, instead, with a quick peck on the cheek and a terse, “I am in a no-parking zone so let’s step it up, darlin’.”
    Those pearls of tender welcome were immediately followed by a quick pivot, the sight of a man’s strong, wide back making its confident, blond way out of the airport,