On the morning of July 9, 2018, Heather Rovet heard a knock at her door. She’d been expecting a handyman to fix the kitchen cabinets in her midtown condo, and she assumed it would be the same chubby older gentleman that the renovation company had sent last time. But when she opened the door, she found a striking man in his 40s with salt-and-pepper hair and an adorable smile split by a tiny gap between his front teeth.
The repairman introduced himself as Jace Peretti. Heather invited him in, and they chatted as Jace fixed the cabinets. When he was done, she asked if he wouldn’t mind helping install towel bars in her bathrooms, and he agreed. As he was working, they got so lost in conversation—talking about his son, how he used to be a software engineer, how he loved working with his hands—that, after Jace left, Heather realized they installed one of the bars wrong. When Jace returned to fix it, she invited him out to lunch, which led to texting and, eventually, a proper date.
Over dinner at Capocaccia Trattoria, they got to know one another. Heather was 46 at the time, a real estate agent with wavy light-brown hair and the polished charm of a person who works in sales. She’d grown up in Toronto, the daughter of a psychologist and a lawyer. Jace, a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of guy who rode a motorcycle and spoke in clipped sentences, told her that he was born in Italy and that his family moved to Canada when he was a toddler. His parents died young, he said,…
