Now together and never letting go

Maurice first saw Adrienne’s smile in a stack of photos and letters in someone else’s hand.

“Who is that?” he wanted to know. “She’s my sister,” Adrienne’s brother, Anthony, said.

“She’s gonna be mine,” Maurice vowed silently to himself. To Anthony, he said, “I’d like to write to her.”

“No,” said Anthony.

Adrienne, on the cusp of 18 and about to graduate from University City High School, was planning for college.

Maurice, newly 22, was fighting a weapons charge. He was incarcerated at the Philadelphia Detention Center.

“I had to court him before I could talk to her,” remembers Maurice, now 37 and a truck driver with a local firm.

Two months later, Anthony mentioned Maurice in a letter to Adrienne.

“They had become friends,” Adrienne remembered. “Mostly his letter was about seeing what everyone was doing, but he said there was a dude in there that wanted to talk to me.”

Adrienne agreed to one letter. Maurice was determined to make the most of it.

“He let me know a little bit about him, and he asked about me. He asked if I wanted to continue to write, get to know each other, and become friends,” said Adrienne, who is now 32 and a pharmacy technician at a local pharmaceutical company.

Soon, they exchanged two or three letters a week. “I was writing one letter when a song came on by 50 Cent, ‘21 Questions,’ so I started that letter with 21 questions for her: ‘What’s your favorite food? What’s your worst fear?’ And I asked her to ask me 21 questions,” Maurice said.

There were phone calls, too. Written or spoken, their conversations grew deep. Adrienne loved his honesty. “It is hard to put into words how you can develop a pure friendship without a physical element there. He had become a true best friend who I could tell things to without judgment.”

Maurice was never convicted of the weapons charge, but remained incarcerated through pretrial motions and appeals. “Her letters were a bright spot,” he said. “She gave me a different perspective of life from what I was used to. Everything about her was innocent, where everything in my life had seemed kind of tainted.”

While both grew up in North Philadelphia, she was a bookworm and honors student, and he was more street-smart, Adrienne said.

“I always enjoyed reading books, too, but I kept that to myself,” said Maurice. “On the street, I had to be hard-core.”

In another note to Adrienne, Maurice wrote a question right out of middle school: “Would you go out with me?” along with boxes for her to check her choice: yes, no, or maybe. She checked yes.

For two months, they fell out of touch.

Adrienne had graduated, enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, and taken the first semester off to work and save money. “Ultimately, I didn’t attend college – we had a family tragedy,” she said. Her grandmother and great-grandmother died within a few months of each other – the devastating reason she hadn’t contacted Maurice.

After about 2½ years of incarceration, Maurice prevailed in the courts and was released in August 2010.

“When I came home, my Aunt Diane was telling me about this thing called Facebook, where you could type in anybody’s name and they would come up,” Maurice remembered. “I said, ‘Type in this name,’ and up came her picture. ‘That’s her!’ I said.”

“In August 2010, I got this random Facebook message from [a stranger],” Adrienne said. “It was Maurice’s aunt, saying he wanted to let me know that he got out and he would like to see me, and she gave me his phone number.”

For a few weeks, they spoke by phone. “I was nervous because we had never seen each other in person – only pictures,” said Adrienne. “I thought, ‘what if he gets here and we don’t like each other?’ ”

Then one evening when Adrienne was hanging out with her mother and sister at her mother’s place, Maurice asked if he could come by. “It felt like we were starting all over again,” Maurice said. “It really was like meeting him for the first time,” Adrienne agreed.

Maurice brought a container of dates – he still laughs at his pun. They sat outside, eating and talking; then a raccoon showed up and Adrienne took off for the indoors. She suggested the Manayunk Diner instead. Maurice had never been anyplace like that before. He enjoyed many new experiences with Adrienne. “We would put on nice clothes and go out to dinner and a movie,” he said. Adrienne loved it when Maurice took her to places he used to ride his bike as a kid: Penn’s Landing and the Schuylkill waterfalls.

“I love the way he loves me, and that he doesn’t love anyone else that way,” Adrienne said. “We have a lot of friends who say on their first meeting of him that you really can’t read him. But I get the inside depths of who he really is. And he’s a goofball.”

The couple got their first apartment together in Northeast Philadelphia in 2011. They later had a daughter, Drew, who is now 10. In 2019, Adrienne and Maurice bought their Cheltenham home, now a favorite gathering spot for family and friends.

Maurice suggested they host a big cookout to celebrate 10 years together. Adrienne prides herself on her gift-giving abilities and she went all out: a gold rope chain Maurice had been eyeing and a rare pair of sneakers to replace a pair that had been destroyed. “I thought I had him beat,” she said.

Then Maurice gave her an infinity ring necklace and a card, which he asked her to read out loud.

“These infinity rings represent the many lifetimes it took me to find you,” she read. “This engagement ring represents me never letting you go now that I have you.”

Adrienne put her face in her hands and cried. Then she looked up at Maurice and said yes.

On July 15, 2022, 85 guests joined the couple and their daughter at the Bluestone Country Club in Blue Bell.

Adrienne and Maurice did not want to see each other prior to the ceremony so instead, they opted for a first touch. “I was on one side of a wall and he was on the other side,” said Adrienne. “We held hands and exchanged letters.” Those letters, a nod to how they met, are now displayed in their home.

Adrienne’s brother Andre walked her down the aisle. “I almost cried,” said Maurice. “She’s always been beautiful, from the first picture I saw, and the first date we had in person. Then the doors opened and she came through and I was in shock. It was ‘Damn! Is that my woman I’m marrying?’ ”

Her side of the aisle felt “like heaven,” said Adrienne. “Seeing him standing there, all GQ and tuxed up, and all of our friends and family, it was like, this moment is finally here. We had been living this life for years prior, but this is the day y’all get to witness what we’ve been living this whole time.”

Journeys of the Heart officiant Naila Francis shared their story and led them through their vows.

At the reception, Adrienne never left the dance floor, so later, Maurice left their hotel just long enough to find some good bar food and two bottles of porter.

Before they met, “It was almost as if I was living with ice around my heart. I didn’t want to experience emotion, good or bad, and I had this persona to be hard-core, all day, every day,” said Maurice. “She melted the ice around my heart. She came into my life and turned me back into the man that I truly was.”

The couple looks forward to their first wedding anniversary later this summer, more vacations, more family gatherings, and possibly, more children.