For years Laura Fleming assumed Jarrod Sharp was married.

He seemed like the marrying type and Fleming thought some smart girl would snap him up.

Fleming and Sharp first caught sight of each other at a Quebec City nightclub in 1999. Sharp, who was in the Air Force at the time, was on a ski trip with buddies. Fleming, a native of Newmarket, Ontario, was with a friend for a New Year’s getaway.

Sharp made his way to Fleming and while crowds danced around them, the two began a conversation that would last most of the night.

“I thought he was really smart and that was really impressive to me. He was polite and handsome. And I remember he had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen,” says Fleming, then 20.

They stuck by each other for much of the next few days, until Sharp, then 23, returned to his military base in Virginia Beach. But the two e-mailed occasionally, and for her birthday he sent her a CD of classical music and a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” “It was stuff we talked about,” she says. “He remembered.”

That summer, Sharp drove to Fleming’s hometown and slept on her parents’ couch. “I just remember thinking what a wonderful person I had met,” he says. “I wanted to get to know her more and continue what we had started — and to see if there was a possibility of more to it.”

It seemed like there might be, but after that visit she went off to college and he returned to Virginia. They both moved on to the workforce and then to graduate school. The communication slowed to an e-mail once or twice a year. They wrote about how they spent their time — she was studying climate change and he went to business school and then law school — but didn’t discuss their romantic lives.

Even when Sharp hadn’t heard from her in months, he would sometimes quiz himself on the name of her hometown, not wanting to forget how to find her. Fleming was always giddy after hearing from him, but he seemed like a mythical figure from the past.

“I developed this impression that at any point he would be married and have tons of children,” she says.

In early 2010, a decade after their first meeting, Fleming mentioned her assumption in an e-mail. Sharp replied that he was still single. She told him how highly she’d always thought of him and their correspondence suddenly accelerated.

“It was really exciting,” she says. “It was like getting to know each other all over again, but at the same time already knowing each other.”

Soon they began to speak regularly by phone. “It was like there was no gap,” Sharp says. That June she accepted an invitation to visit him in Bethesda. For weeks she anticipated the trip, constantly wondering how it would feel to see him in person.

But when she stepped off the plane at Dulles, she couldn’t find him. Her Canadian cellphone didn’t work, so she wandered the airport corridors, scanning for his face. She began to think the worst — maybe he changed his mind or was seeing someone else. With tears in her eyes, she approached the information desk and asked to call his number.