"I don't think I could go a week without seeing this person."

Under the fluorescent lights of a hallway at the Washington Hospital Center, Vivek Patil and Sonya Chawla veered toward each other and simultaneously said: "Do I know you from somewhere?"

Every day for two weeks in late 2007, Chawla, then a medical student doing a one-month rotation, watched Patil come into the busy doctors' cafeteria, sit down alone and bury himself in a newspaper. She thought he was attractive but figured he was taken.

"What guy is so disinterested in all these people that he's reading the newspaper every day?" she recalls thinking. "I was like, 'Where's the wedding ring? Oh, he's a surgeon, he probably doesn't wear his ring.' "

She never noticed him looking at her. "I had my newspaper, but I had eye holes cut out," jokes Patil, who was doing a fellowship. He'd made up his mind to approach Chawla, but couldn't find an opportunity.

That day in the hallway, he had his chance. And the line wasn't a generic come-on -- she really did look familiar. Talking to her, Patil realized they had met before: In 1998, he'd taken a break from med school in New York to visit his alma mater, Georgetown. Walking across campus with a friend, they'd stopped for a two-minute conversation with Chawla, an undergrad who'd grown up knowing Patil's friend.

When she said her name in the hospital, the encounter came back for Patil, though Chawla didn't remember it. After a brief chat, they each went on their way, Patil having decided he'd like to ask her out.

But then, he says, it became "one of those things -- 'All right, I'm going to talk to her tomorrow, if I see her.' Then two days would go by. 'Okay, I'm going to talk to her tomorrow if I see her.' And then by that time it was two weeks later and she was on her way out."

Chawla was heading back to medical school in Chicago, and though she gave Patil her phone number and mentioned she'd hoped to return to Washington for her full residency the next summer, he never called.

That May, Chawla visited her parents in Potomac. They insisted she come along to the wedding of a family friend, the same guy who introduced her to Patil 10 years earlier.

Across the crowded ballroom of an Arlington hotel, she spotted Patil and sped over to tell him she'd been accepted as a resident at Georgetown and would be moving back to Washington. "But I got the sense that he thought, 'Well, listen, this is my best friend getting married and I'm really busy, but it's great seeing you -- take care,' " she recalls.

In truth, he was sitting at a table of groomsmen, whose conversation stopped when Chawla approached. "It was five or six guys talking with each other, joking around and all of a sudden this hot girl walks up . . . and everybody's kinda like 'Oooookay,' " he says. "They were like, 'What was that? You should ask that girl out.' I said, 'I definitely am going to.' "

But he didn't. At least not right away. Patil, a colorectal surgeon, waited until the first week of July even to text her. He told her he was leaving on a month-long road trip and wanted to know if he could take her to dinner when he returned.