But I trucked on, winding my way through the erratic crowd, which required all of my attention to navigate. My gaze scanned the sidewalk ahead of me, calculating the fastest path to the subway station with the trajectory of the flow of people laid out before me like a map. The lady with the stroller running obliquely for a coffee shop up ahead. A businessman still on his phone, squinting through the rain as he beelined for a newspaper stand. A pack of kids playing hooky, trotting and laughing and horsing around.

I was so busy looking in front of me, I didn’t have a chance to dodge the small body before we collided.

We spun from the impact, a whirl of arms and hands. My briefcase hit the ground—abandoned so I could grab her—and her newspaper, which she’d been using for an umbrella, flew into the air and opened like a soggy bird with a broken wing before spiraling to the sidewalk.

They say it’s adrenaline that speeds up your brain in moments like these, a rapid firing of neurons to catalog every detail looking for danger. But I was too stupid to be afraid.

She was soft and small, the sound of her surprise striking some chord of recognition in me. I felt every flex and release of her arms beneath my palms, felt the curves of her body against mine, felt the shift of her legs in perfect time with mine, like we were caught in the tango and not in a matter of physics and force. But it was the scent of her that slipped over me like that incessant rain—delicate, velvety gardenia so perfectly feminine, I found myself momentarily lost in the luxury of it.

I stopped us with a well-placed bracing of my foot that once again mimicked the tango, her body flush with mine and my hands—now somehow around her waist—pressing her against me, holding her still.

But when she looked up, a thunderbolt split my ribs open.

It wasn’t just the bottomless brown of her eyes or the button of her nose, dashed with almost imperceptible freckles. It wasn’t the soft bow of her lips, full and pink and parted in surprise. It wasn’t the shape of her small face, the line of her chin, the curve of her cheek that I instantly knew would fit exactly in my palm. It wasn’t her fair hair, made dark by the rain, curling and clinging to the gentle curve of her jaw.

It was all of her. Every cell, every molecule, the whole of her so utterly right. Had we been in a room full of people or packed in a subway car, I had no doubt I would have seen her just as I did now.

With all of me.