I watched as the maintenance staff of the office building where I worked transformed the food court. A large, synthetic Christmas tree was dragged out to the middle of the room, strung with white lights, and draped in blue and silver tinsel. Giant corrugated-styrene snowflakes were brought out of storage and hung from the ceiling, just as they had been every year for as long as I’d worked in downtown Salt Lake City.

I was watching the transformation when I noticed him staring at me. Him—the stranger who would change everything. I didn’t know his name, but I had seen him before. I’d probably seen him a hundred times before, as we ate pretty much every day in the same food court: I near the Cafe Rio with my sweet pork salad and he, fifty yards away, over by the Japanese food emporium eating something with chopsticks. Why was he looking at me?

He was handsome. Not in your Photoshopped Abercrombie & Fitch catalog way—women weren’t necessarily stopping midsentence when he walked into a room—but he certainly did catch their attention. He was about six feet tall, trim, narrow-hipped, athletically built. He was always dressed impeccably—in an expensive, custom-tailored suit, with a crisp white shirt and a silk tie.

I guessed he was a lawyer and, from his accoutrements, one who made good money. I, on the other hand, worked as a hotel and venue coordinator at a midlevel travel wholesaler booking educational trips for high school students. The company I worked for was called the International Consortium of Education, but we all just called it by its acronym, ICE, which was appropriate as I felt pretty frozen in my job. I guess that was true of most of my life.

The lawyer and I had had eye contact before. It was two or three weeks back when I had stepped on an elevator that he was already on. The button for the seventh floor was lit, which was further evidence that he was a lawyer, since the top two floors of the tower were occupied by law firms.

He had smiled at me, and I’d given him an obligatory return smile. I remember his gaze had lingered on me a little longer than I’d expected, long enough to make me feel self-conscious. He’d looked at me as if he knew me, or wanted to say something, then he’d turned away. I thought he had stolen a glance at my bare ring finger, though later I decided that it had just been my imagination. I had gotten off the elevator on the third floor with another woman, who sighed, “He was gorgeous.” I had nodded in agreement.