Ethan had loved Gwen from the time they were children, but he was reluctant to fully and finally commit to their relationship, until his aunt Sheridan pushed him into it. Knowing he was proposing for the wrong reasons, Gwen turned him down— she would not marry him, except for love, and opted to wait for a more sincere proposal. However, their prospective engagement was pushed to the back-burner when Ethan began being the victim of mysterious "accidents," and became determined to learn who was stalking him. With the help of private detective Frank Lomax, he eventually discovered that the stalker was Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald, the daughter of the Crane family housekeeper Pilar. Theresa's teenage crush on Ethan made her clumsy and accident-prone in his presence. Ethan befriended Theresa without knowing the depth of her feelings for him, all but oblivious as the starry-eyed ingenue assigned cosmic meaning to their every encounter and his every off-handed comment.