Break out the tissues!
Bachelorette Gabby Windey is brought to tears in an exclusive sneak peek of her upcoming date with Nate, a 33-year-old electrical engineer from Chicago, who she thinks has "great character."
"It's just been really fun," she says in a confessional before their date, "to really peel back the layers and get to know him."
But things take a turn for the serious when they sit down for dinner. Before they can even dig into the appetizer, Nate tells her, "There is one thing I do want to tell you about... I have a beautiful baby girl who is six and she is my world."
"A pocket of my heart just burst open the first time she said dad," he continues. "I'm a girl dad, 1,000 percent."
This is when Gabby, who is one of The Bachelorette's co-leads alongside Rachel Recchia, starts crying. "That's so sweet," she tells Nate, adding in the confessional that this moment brought them closer together. "I can just see him having such a big capacity for love."
More than that, it reminds her of her own tight-knit relationship with her father. When her hometown with Clayton Echard aired in February, she wrote of her dad on Instagram, "He is the most important person in my life and has never missed an important event, dance lesson, performance, etc. and hometowns were no different."
"I want to share every big event with him, so when I realized that it was him honking outside, my heart (and eyes) swelled to a gravity-shifting size," she remembered. "All of this emotion was multiplied by feelings of new love—which you know is rare and exciting in itself... That night was one you wish you could just bottle up and keep forever."
While Gabby and her dad are close, it doesn't mean she's going to share all the details from her time on the series with him—namely her Fantasy Suite experiences.. As she and her co-Bachelorette Rachel told E!'s Daily Pop, they're keeping things on a need to know basis.
"Rachel and I are very serious about finding our partners, hopefully finding our husbands," Gabby explained. "So, I think it's just understood in the process without explicitly saying it."
The Bachelorette airs Mondays on ABC.