On what should have been the most magical night of their lives, the small Scottish town of Inverness gathered instead under a grey December sky to say goodbye to Chloe MacLeod, 28, and her fiancé Jamie Fraser, 30. As the opening chords of Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” – the song they had chosen for their first dance – drifted through St Andrew’s Cathedral on December 23, Chloe’s white coffin was carried down the aisle she had walked in her mind a thousand times in a wedding dress. In Jamie’s inside pocket, untouched since the crash, lay a platinum engagement ring and a folded note that read simply: “Will you marry me, Chlo? Christmas Eve, under the fairy lights, forever starts now.”

Friends say Jamie had been planning the proposal for months. He had booked the rooftop of the Kingsmills Hotel, arranged for snow machines, and enlisted Chloe’s brother Callum to hide with a camera. The ring – a delicate oval diamond flanked by tiny sapphires, the exact shade of her eyes – had been sized in secret while she was away on a hen weekend in Edinburgh. “He kept practicing on us,” childhood friend Lewis Campbell told mourners outside the cathedral. “He’d get down on one knee in the pub car park at 2 a.m., slurring the speech but dead serious about every word. He said she was the only future he wanted.”

The couple had been together since sixth year at Inverness Royal Academy. They survived university apart, long-distance years while Chloe trained as a pediatric nurse in Glasgow, and the pandemic that postponed their original 2022 wedding plans. In November, Jamie finally secured the promotion that meant they could afford the farmhouse in Culloden they’d been saving for. “He told me on the phone the night before the accident,” Chloe’s best friend Megan Fraser (no relation) said through tears. “He was buzzing. Said, ‘This is it, Megs. Christmas Eve, ring, knee, tears, yes – the whole fairy tale.’”

Instead, on the evening of December 21, as they drove home from a Christmas market in Aviemore, their car was struck head-on by a lorry on the A9. Police confirmed both were killed instantly. The emergency crews who arrived first found the ring box still clutched in Jamie’s hand, the velvet cracked open as if he had been moments from showing her on the drive home.

At the funeral, attended by more than 600 people, the minister read from the note found in Jamie’s pocket. Chloe’s mother, Shona, placed the unopened ring box on top of her daughter’s coffin. “She’ll still say yes,” she whispered, voice breaking. “She’s just saying it somewhere else now.”

Afterwards, friends released 30 white doves – one for every year Jamie had been alive – into the icy Highland air. As they wheeled upward, the cathedral organist began the opening bars of “In the Arms of an Angel” again, unscripted. There wasn’t a dry eye in the pews.

In the days since, an impromptu memorial has grown outside the couple’s flat on Ardconnel Street: fairy lights, hundreds of proposal cards from strangers, and a single Post-it that has gone viral on social media: “He asked. She said yes. Heaven just got the best Christmas engagement ever.”

Jamie never made it to Christmas Eve. But in the hearts of everyone who loved them, the answer still rings clear.