BOOKS

When it comes to power couples, Cole and Savannah LaBrant are pretty up there. The pair—who came up on social media separately—now run one of the best family channels on YouTube. Basically, they're #goals in every way. 

While they share a lot online, fans don't really know all of the deets of their adorable relationship—or exactly what their lives were like *before* they met. That'll change once they release Cole & Sav: Our Surprising Love Story on Oct. 9. Lucky for you, we're giving you a peek into the story behind the sweethearts right now with an exclusive excerpt. 

Check out a piece of chapter 3, "A Girl with a Past." It's a touching, personal excerpt from Sav:

To be honest, when I first met Cole at The Grove, I didn’t see him as anything more than a possible friend who might make VidCon less awkward to attend. I was a twenty-three-year-old single mom living in Southern California. He was a nineteen-year- old kid visiting LA from Alabama. I certainly didn’t have any kind of romantic thoughts about him. Don’t get me wrong. I thought he was cute but more in a “Aww, he’s so cute” kind of way, not in a potential boyfriend kind of way. I already had an on-again, off-again boyfriend in Ev’s dad, who at the time was more off-again than on-again.

I never had much luck with guys before I met Cole. My family moved from San Jose to SoCal right before my freshman year. I started high school and didn’t know anyone. Then I met a guy who seemed to be terrific. We even met at church! We dated all through high school, and I thought we had a future together . . . until I found out that he was cheating on me. I really loved him and had given him the one thing I could never get back— my virginity. When he cheated on me, my world came crashing down. The news hit me extra hard because a few years earlier my dad had cheated on my mom, basically ending their twenty-seven year marriage. My parents splitting up completely blindsided me.

When I was a little girl, my dad was absolutely the best dad any girl could ever hope for. I was such a daddy’s girl. Though I loved both of my parents very much, he was my favorite. My mom knew it, but she seemed okay with it. The two of them had an amazing relationship. He and I did too. Every morning before he took me to school, he went to Starbucks and bought hot chocolate for my sister and me. He also always made sure the car was nice and warm inside before we got in for the early drive to school. After school my sister and I had dance classes every day. My dad sold insurance, so he bought the building next door to the dance studio and had his office there. He did it so he could be close to us and drop over and watch us dance every day. That meant so much to me. He was good about doing little things like that. He also made big gestures as well. I remember him taking my sister and me shopping. Once we went to the mall, and he handed each of us a one-hundred dollar bill to shop with. He wasn’t trying to buy our love. I think he wanted us to learn how to handle money. Whatever his reason, I never forgot that day. We had such a great time together.

Things started to change when I was in middle school, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. We moved from San Jose down to Dana Point in Orange County, California. We moved, but not all of us, at least not all the time. My dad lived in San Jose during the week and came down and stayed with us every other weekend. My mom told me that he had to stay up there for work. I didn’t have any reason not to believe her. Maybe if I’d paid a little closer attention, I might have had some doubts. Before we moved, my parents had been fighting a little more than normal. I didn’t read too much into it since they’d been married so long. After we moved and my dad came down to stay with us on weekends, I usually found him sleeping on the couch instead of with my mom. Again, this should have been a huge red flag to me, but I knew my dad liked to stay up late watching television. I figured he’d fallen asleep there and didn’t wake up until morning. Eventually my dad’s every-other-weekend visits turned into once a month visits, then once every couple of months until he hardly came to see us at all. I just assumed he was going through a busy season at work. But then one day the doorbell rang. My mom opened the door, and a neighbor we didn’t know very well was standing there. She told my mom someone had called her house with a message for my mom. Then she said that the woman on the phone told her to tell my mom that she was so sorry. As soon as the neighbor said that, my mom burst out crying. The neighbor apologized and left. After closing the door my mom backed up a little and collapsed onto the stairs. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. I tried to comfort her, but I was confused. Why would some woman calling a neighbor to say she was sorry make my mom fall apart? It didn’t make any sense to me. Even though I didn’t know what was going on, I told my mom all those things you say to people when you want them to feel better. “It’s okay, Mom. Everything is going to be all right,” I said.

“You don’t understand, Savannah,” she said. She tried to say something else, but she couldn’t hold herself together long enough to get the words out. Instead, she buried her face in my arms and cried her eyes out. Finally, she sat up and gathered herself enough to say, “The woman who called our neighbor is not just any woman. She’s the woman your dad’s been having an affair with over the past couple of years.” Before that afternoon, I had thought I had a great Christian family. When we lived together, we went to church together nearly every Sunday. My dad had seemed like such a godly man. He was best friends with our pastor. Now all of that— my whole childhood, really— felt like a lie.

Want to find out the rest of the emotional story? Click HERE to read the full chapter from Cole & Sav: Our Surprising Love Story. Then, grab the book when it hits shelves on Oct. 9.

by Sydney Adamson | 9/12/2018