Oooh, Susie Slid Into Clayton’s DMs After Their Messy Bachelor Breakup

Clayton Echard and Susie Evans may have left Iceland separately, but the breakup didn’t stick. During “After The Final Rose,” the very-much-together couple revealed that they reunited after the show finished filming. So, um, how did Evans and Echard get back together after their messy Bachelor breakup? It was actually Evans who sparked the reunion — and she did it with a DM slide.

On a March 15 episode of Nick Viall’s podcast The Viall Files, Evans revealed how they reconnected, and it happened pretty much right away. “I got my phone back, called my parents, [and] DM-ed Clayton,” she explained. Evans didn’t even wait to get home first; she sent that first message while she was still at the Newark airport.

“I didn’t DM him with the intention of starting a relationship,” Evans added, “but I was like, ‘Are you OK?’ And, ‘I will respect your boundaries, whatever they are. But if you want to have one more candid conversation, here’s my phone number. Give me a call.’”

At first, Echard didn’t quite believe it was Evans who sent the DM. “I was just scrolling through my DMs cause I was actually still traveling back… and all of a sudden, I see her name, and I was like, ‘This has gotta be some fake account trying to catch me, like, they’re trying to already spoil the ending,’” he explained to the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast on March 16. “So I had to click on and had to, like, do some recon and saw that the account was legitimate.”

That same day, they talked on the phone for five hours, and they started having daily, long phone calls. According to Evans, “We’d stay on the phone for, like, five hours every night for weeks just talking with no expectation, no ‘what is this?’” Instead, they talked about “what we’re looking for in the future [and] what we’re looking for in a partner.”

After “about a month or so” of talking, Evans was ready to make things official. Apparently, the realization hit her that “Wow, this man loves me.” She added, “I asked Clayton to be my boyfriend cause after a certain point, we were like, ‘OK, what are we doing? … Are we gonna pursue something?’”

And they’ve been living happily ever after since then — besides, of course, the fact that they still had to watch Echard’s season completely implode. Fortunately, it seems like they’re stronger for it. Finally, a silver (or rose-colored) lining!