“Man,” he said cautiously, sliding the device toward my plate. “You need to see this.”

It was a video uploaded by my cousin’s wife. The caption was simple: “When a little girl explains what family really means.”

The footage was staggering in its raw intimacy. It caught the flash of Lily’s silver shoes, the exact devastating moment the congregation read her sign, and the second my stoic facade broke wide open.

It caught a man hugging a child as if he’d been wandering a desert his whole life and only just found water.

By midnight the counter hit 80,000. By our first breakfast as a married couple, it was at 1.6 million.

Thousands of strangers were pouring their hearts into the comments. Construction workers admitted to weeping in their trucks. Single mothers wrote that the video had restored their faith in finding love.