FROM A SOUTH CAROLINA GIRL WHO WOKE UP AT 3:30 AM TO FOX NEWS SUNSHINE ICON — AINSLEY EARHARDT AMID BREAKDOWN, LOSS, AND A CHURCH PROPOSAL AT THE NATURAL CHURCH. On the air at 6 a.m., finishing work when the country was just waking up — Ainsley still brings a golden smile to millions despite having experienced a failed marriage and the loss of her mother. Every morning when she leaves the studio, she hears the familiar call on the phone: “Sunshine!” — from Sean Hannity, now her fiancé, who keeps her going. From a humble childhood in South Carolina to lit Park Avenue, from a single mother to holding hands again at Christmas church—Ainsley Earhardt didn’t just wake up early, she woke America up with her life’s energy.

It’s just after 9:30 am and Ainsley Earhardt’s working day is already all but done.

As a co-host of Fox News‘s weekday morning show, Fox and Friends, she has been on air since 6:00 and up since 3:30.

Earhardt, 48, has now changed out of the slimline cornflower blue pants and top that viewers saw on screen into something less ruthlessly constricting: A smart boucle jacket and cream pants.

She briefly stops to say hello to a pair of Fox News fans outside the network’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters – the high-wattage smile she sports on set still on full blast – and we slip into the backseat of her black SUV for a short ride to her Park Avenue apartment.

Then, her phone rings.

‘Sunshine!’ a male voice booms.

It’s cable news legend Sean Hannity, Earhardt’s fiancé.

He calls at this time every day.

‘Sunshine,’ as Hannity, 63, explains to the Daily Mail, which was given exclusive access to interview Earhardt, is his pet name for her because she ‘wakes up America’ and – as I can confirm – is always smiling.

Yet there is far more to Earhardt than the sunny affect that she presents to her fans each morning.

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There is far more to Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt than the sunny affect that she presents to her fans each morning

When Hannity first asked Earhardt out, she says, ‘We asked our boss first. I said, ‘I really want your support because I’m crazy about this guy”

In an extraordinarily candid and often emotional interview, the Fox News star opened up about her ‘hard times,’ from the grief that followed the death of her beloved mother to the pain of her divorce from the father of her nine-year-old daughter, Hayden.

But, Earhardt told the Daily Mail, ‘Even in the bad times, I saw God, I knew that He was with me and felt His presence and it lifted me up and carried me through.’

Hers is a story of faith, redemption and the unexpected joy of love with a man about who she is ‘just crazy.’

Settled in the opulent den of her Manhattan apartment, surrounded by plush furnishings and heaping floral displays of scarlet, fuchsia and purple peonies, Earhardt reflects: ‘Nobody walks down the aisle and plans for a divorce. I was a really strong Christian, and I wanted to be married forever to one person. Life didn’t work out that way for me.’

It is six years since Earhardt’s divorce from ex-husband Will Proctor, 41, was finalized, but it is clear she still bears the scars of their very public split.

Earhart and former Clemons University quarterback, Proctor, met on a blind date in 2012 and married that same year.

The union coincided with a string of professional successes for Earhardt.

She got her start at Fox News in 2007, at the age of 29, but it wasn’t until 2013 that she was offered a slot presenting Fox and Friends First, which airs ahead of Fox and Friends between 5:00 and 6:00 am.

Three years later, in 2016, she was promoted to the Fox and Friends sofa.

‘I will say I’m very grateful to Fox that I was in position that a lot of women are not in,’ said Earhardt, as her miniature poodle waddles towards his mistress and looks up adoringly.

‘I remember talking to someone I was very close to growing up and she was in an unhappy marriage, and she didn’t feel like she could leave because she didn’t have any money. I never wanted to be that person,’ she said.