Rebekah Gregory and Pete DiMartino met through a friend in winter 2012. Rebekah was visiting upstate New York on a business trip and ended up stopping by the restaurant Pete worked at.
They began talking on Facebook after Rebekah got home to Texas. "And then she lied and told me her Facebook wasn't working and that I needed to text her so she gave me her phone number," Pete told BuzzFeed.
They were on the phone for hours with each other and splitting time between Texas and New York after that. In the year leading up to the Boston Marathon, they introduced each other to their families.
On the day of the marathon, they were there with their two families to cheer on Pete's mother. They were at the finish line when the bombs went off.
Pete, Rebekah, Rebekah's son Noah, and Pete's sister were the closest to the bomb and were all hit by shrapnel. Pete was hit with the most shrapnel, but because of where his older sister was hit, she was hurt the most.
"Recovery was hard, probably the hardest part of it was not wanting to hear about the other person's injuries," Rebekah said. "Pete was in a separate hospital and I knew he was injured but I didn't know how bad."
When they announced their engagement, they were shocked by the resulting media attention.
"We were planning something so small with just our immediate family," Rebekah said. That changed when they were contacted by wedding site The Knot, which offered to throw Pete and Rebekah a dream wedding.
Rebekah and Pete will receive the ultimate romantic wedding, created by Marcy Blum and her team at Marcy Blum Associates. Marcy is a celebrity wedding and event designer, who has planned the weddings of LeBron James and Savannah Brinson, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, and Billy Joel and Katie Lee, amongst other celebrities. PEOPLE.com will partner to share insider celebrity wedding trends for the wedding and give their readers a true look inside the couple's unique journey to the altar through a first-person blog that Rebekah will write weekly for the site.
"Something went off in my head like, 'I can really do that? Really,'" Rebekah said. "So now it's kind of spun into this whole thing."
Both Rebekah and Pete say that they're shocked by all of it and incredibly grateful that they've been given the chance at a fairytale wedding after their horrible ordeal.
