Blake’s words of encouragement and blunt wake-up call were exactly what Kevin needed to press through the darkest day of his life.
“I was probably somewhere between five to 10 seconds away from taking my own life,” Kevin told Inside Edition. “Nobody but her could have spoken a word of reason to me.”
But interestingly enough, Blake recalls the situation differently. She says she remembers receiving a call from Kevin while on a school trip. “We had very different experiences of the same event,” she said, adding, “I get goosebumps every single time I talk about it.”
Over the next 10 years, the two kept in touch more frequently between visits and phone calls. Slowly the bond between two best friends grew into a budding romance.
What Blake didn’t know is that Kevin had been recording his thoughts about their relationship in a journal ever since the day he got that phone call.
“Over the years, [the journal] grew a couple words at a time,” he said. “Eventually I had a pretty substantial amount of information I wanted to convey and then I realized, ‘Holy crap, I think this is a proposal.'”
In 2015, Kevin invited Blake to come along on a work trip to Switzerland, where he proposed using the very words he wrote in his journal the night she stopped him from making the biggest mistake of his life:
