The proposal that almost was not.

A reader wrote to us three days after his engagement. He had come very close, three times, to cancelling the entire booking.

'The first time,' he wrote, 'I convinced myself the whole thing was too staged. That she would see through it. That the food would arrive and she would already know.'

'The second time, I convinced myself she would say no. That I was choosing the wrong night. That I should wait until I was more sure — sure of what, exactly, I couldn't tell you.'

'The third time, an hour before the chef arrived, I called her to cancel. She didn't pick up. I set the table anyway.'

The chef arrived, saw his face, sat him down on a stool in the kitchen and said — as she was unpacking the ingredients — 'You are not proposing to her tonight. You proposed to her a long time ago, in a hundred small ways. Tonight you are just telling her that you know.'

'And then she went back to slicing shallots,' he wrote. 'And I stopped shaking.'