Lawyers in training became partners forever
Brad Runyon started out in the wrong class section in law school, but he wound up in the right line when he got a parking ticket.
“The first two weeks you’re divided up,” Brad says of his freshman year at the University of Arkansas School of Law. “I had friends in the other section and they kept talking about this really good-looking blonde that was in their section. I hadn’t seen her. I was in the wrong section.”
He peeked into the other section’s classroom to see what all the fuss was about.
“Immediately I know which girl they’re talking about,” he says.
A couple of days later he went to pay a parking ticket on campus.
“Ahead of me in line is that blond girl from the other law school class,” he says. “I thought, well, I’ve got to do something, right? I mean, this is my shot. I sure didn’t have enough confidence to just ask her out. So, I invited her to our study group that evening.”
That girl, Emily Moss, gave him her number so he could call and let her know what time everyone else would be at his house to study. She went to the gym and had just gotten home and taken a quick shower when he called to tell her to come over.
“I threw on some scrub pants and a T-shirt and I had wet hair and I threw it up on top of my head and I thought, well, no big deal, I’ll just get my stuff and go,” she says.
When Brad opened the door, she caught a whiff of cleaning spray.
“He looked nice and things had obviously been picked up,” she says. “I said, ‘Where is everybody?’”
Brad feigned innocence. “Unfortunately, nobody else showed up that night,” he says. “I don’t have any idea why or any explanation for it, but she was the only one who showed up that night.”
“He’s obviously saying that in jest,” says Emily, who learned much later that no one else showed up because no one else was invited.
“We actually did study that night,” she says. “We spent a lot of time afterward just talking about where we had come from and our families and where we had been to school and we stayed up late just kind of talking about life.”
Not long after their “study group” Brad and Emily found themselves holding hands as they walked down the street to meet some friends. Their first official date was a couple of days later.
Brad had a headache when he arrived to pick her up for dinner for their first date so he called back to the bedroom where she was getting dressed, asking if she had Advil or Tylenol. She told him to look in the kitchen drawer, where he mistook her migraine medication for ibuprofen.
At dinner, Brad started acting strange and Emily realized what happened. After consulting her sister, a medical student, Emily managed to get him back to her apartment where he promptly fell asleep on her couch, and she watched over him all night to make sure he would be OK.
He was, and after that they were inseparable — they went to Razorbacks football and basketball games together, spent time with friends, and they studied — with friends and together.
“We knew we were going to get married by the end of the first year,” Brad says. “It was easy.”
Brad wasn’t sure how he was going to look for a ring for Emily without her knowing. One of his professors made him a research assistant so he could tell Emily he was doing work for the professor while he was actually shopping for an engagement diamond.
After finals ended in their second year of law school, Brad told Emily that they had been invited to a friend’s grandfather’s house to celebrate. The drive to where the friend’s grandfather supposedly lived put them close to St. Catherine’s at Bell Gable, a little hand-built chapel in Fayetteville.
They stopped and went inside, and they knelt together at the altar.
“We prayed together and as we get done praying she got up to leave and I just stayed on my knees and I just turned to her with big ol’ tears in my eyes I asked her if she would marry me and I had the ring out,” Brad says.
There wasn’t really a gathering at a grandfather’s house, but they did gather with friends and family for an informal celebration on Dickson Street.
They exchanged their vows on May 28, 2005, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville.
Emily and Brad live in Little Rock with their daughters, Isabella, 9, and Hannah, 7.
As lawyers they don’t have cause to study together much anymore, but they do work in the same building. And they
celebrate the day they met.