That wasn’t Jenny Miller. Jenny was … still is, I suppose, a brunette. That night her hair just brushed her bare shoulders. She was about five-seven, and I never knew her weight. I estimated it as approximately perfect. Her complexion was radiant. (I remember thinking, No visible tattoos, which called for further investigation.) She had a mischievous mouth that seemed to be sharing a private joke with her twinkling green eyes. She had applied just enough makeup to show she cared, but not enough to make a statement. What impressed me most was that she wore her confidence as if it had been designed by Saint Laurent. That’s style.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the Rolling Stone.”

I nodded. That was the pretty obvious nickname I’d picked up within weeks of starting at the Pro. “I know who you are too,” I said. There was an old saying that Capitol Hill was the place where money married power and gave birth to politicians. The Hill attracts more bright and ambitious young people than Tinder late on a Saturday night. Most of them come here intending to do good, and many of them end up staying long enough to do very well. Eventually the best of them get noticed, and Jenny Miller was hard to miss, even without a wheelchair. It wasn’t just those angular cheekbones; she was the chief of staff for Democratic congresswoman Martha McDonnell, making her at thirty-five (as Cher told me later that night when I asked for her bio) the youngest chief on the Hill. I had spoken with people in that office on many occasions. I believe I might have even spoken with her once. But I took one look at her and realized that she easily could become an important source.

Jenny and I flirted through the night, really savoring the possibilities. There were women for whom my chair was an impediment they couldn’t overcome; I got that, I understood it, there were times I wasn’t too thrilled about it myself. That question was always in the back of my mind. My “can’t dance” line was one of several jokes I could wheel out to cover any discomfort. But I knew it made no difference to Jenny when she asked the band to play “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and to the cheers of the guests rode along of the back of Mighty Chair, waving her napkin through the air with great bravado, à la Katharine Ross on Paul Newman’s bicycle handlebars in Butch Cassidy.

We approached the possibility of a relationship with the ease of people dipping our toes in peanut butter. I had never been married; she was one-and-done, thank you very much, she told me, determined never to pay psychic alimony again. How can you not love a beautiful woman who tells you, “All I’m looking for is a good meal and a soft pillow”?

We’d finally gotten together in my apartment on the third night after the initial attacks. Here’s something else most people don’t know; the strongest bond in nature exists between the protein avidin and the ligand biotin. Once they find each other, they cannot be torn apart “by extremes of pH, temperature, organic solvents and other denaturing agents.” Or as I like to describe it, tighter even than a rock star and a supermodel. That was us. That was Jenny and me. We weren’t officially anything, but we were bonded more tightly than any known non-covalent interaction!