A California man had been planning to ask his girlfriend to marry him but he didn’t get around to it before the fires burned down their home but the story has a happy ending and now an impending wedding.
Brian McShea and Stephanie Raynor had moved into their home in Altadena, California about a year ago. Earlier this month they had to evacuate because of the Eaton Canyon fire. They and their pets got out but they lost everything.
Their landlord emailed the couple that the house was gone along with everything else, including the engagement ring McShea recently bought.
He told KABC that he planned to ask Raynor to marry him soon but had not popped the question before the fires were sparked. He had the ring stored in the back of a drawer in his desk.
But as they were going through the charred rubble, he decided to look in one area to find the ring.
“I was like, ‘We’re going to look over here where my desk is,’” McShea told KABC “I did not tell her why. I don’t know what [she] thought we were looking for because it was pretty obvious that a lot of my stuff was gone. So we’re digging around where my desk is ... again, just looking for a stone man. I really didn’t have a lot of hope, but you just brush away some rubble and there’s a little ring, and you pick that up and it’s actually a washer to something, and that happened like four times, and then you pick it up, and there’s a little diamond.”
He found it under some guitar strings, he told KNBC.
He didn’t want to wait for a different time to ask the big question. McShea decided to do it right then and there.
“I was on my knees and I was like, ‘Hey, will you marry me,’” he said.
Raynor said yes.
“And I was crying,” she told the television station.
“I had my glasses with the goggles on top and they like, fogged up completely. So, I just went and I like gave him a big hug and I obviously said yes,” she told KNBC.
They asked a passerby to take a photo of them after the big moment.
The couple planned to get the ring cleaned at the same jeweler from where McShea bought it.
They also plan on staying in the Altadena area, KABC reported.
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