They returned one cool November evening in 2023, and the former colleagues-turned-couple were dressed for a ’70s disco — Hillary in a hot pink jumpsuit, Henry in embellished bellbottoms. They had just returned to their Merrimack, N.H., home after celebrating Hillary’s 37th birthday at the Gimme Gimme Disco — a roving ABBA-inspired dance night — when Henry began putting her pink polka-dot rainboots on her feet and shuffling her toward his car.

“We need eggs,” he remembers fibbing, when Hillary was baffled by the sudden change in plans.

But in Henry’s car’s glove compartment was an engagement ring. He had considered waiting to propose on an upcoming trip, but under the disco ball in the Hampton Ballroom, “we had so much fun and she looked so beautiful…and I brought her boots because I knew where it had to happen.” Once Hillary recognized the 10-minute trip’s destination, the pieces began to click into place.

Instead of driving to the store, Henry drove to Benedictine Park. There, they emerged through the darkness in sequins and spandex — startling some loitering teens — and began the five-minute hike up the hill. As they walked, Henry started narrating the steps he’d taken to get to this day.

Months before, he told Hillary as they walked, he’d asked her twin teenage sons, Conner and Dylan, for their blessings.

“I talk to you about this because I’m not just marrying your mom, I’m also marrying you guys,” he remembers telling them over a boys’ night dinner. The twins happily agreed, and continue to hold him accountable — “Remember, you’re also married to me so you better give me good Christmas presents this year,” one recently quipped.

Not long after, Henry spoke to her parents, who live in Merrimack, where Hillary grew up. (Henry spent his childhood in Managua, Nicaragua, and moved to Merrimack in 2016.) Her mother helped Henry design an engagement ring inspired by a cocktail ring Hillary owned and longed to wear on a daily, forever basis.

As Henry finished his story and they approached the peak, they both heard an animal-like growl.

“It was a deer,” he says.

“I think it was a cougar-ish, apex predator type,” Hillary says. “So, we could have died.”

Empowered by the moment’s adrenaline and her pink faux fur jacket, she made herself as “big as possible” (she’s about 5′3″ to his 6′), raising her arms above her head and roaring aloud in response to the creature they estimate was “maybe 40 yards” away. She remembers thinking, “No way in hell, wild animal, you’re not disrupting my engagement!”

As Henry shone his phone’s flashlight into the surrounding woods, Hillary noticed a shooting star in the sky above them. When he missed it, he took it as a sign to propose, already.

They assumed the growling creature moved on as they spent the next 15 minutes crying and hugging after Hillary had answered, “Yes.”

On the trek back to the car, Henry saw a second shooting star: “What are the odds?” he says.

Henry and Hillary met by accident. She was working as a scrum master — a type of project team coach/facilitator — for Fidelity Investments’ Merrimack campus in 2017 when she signed up for what she thought was an open learning session on deployment strategies. But when she arrived at the meeting, she realized it was meant to be a small team training.

Crossed wires had led to Henry’s meeting with his direct reports being published on a companywide events calendar.

“[It was] a little awkward, but also kind of funny,” Hillary remembers. “I’m a very social person, so I was like ‘Great, I get to network and meet all these new people.’”

Henry, though, identifies as “reserved” — “I don’t smile at people. I don’t wave unless they wave me at first,” he says (with a smile). But he “wasn’t angry that she crashed my meeting,” he says. “I was more amused.”

Hillary was married at the time; her friendship with Henry began months later after he noticed Hillary’s copy of Randall Munroe’s “What if?,” a book that answers hypothetical questions using scientific evidence. “That book definitely opened him up and warmed him to me,” she remembers. “He became part of my social circle in the office.”

Hillary, who is now a strategy consultant, left Fidelity toward the end of 2019. She and her then-husband, with whom she shares twin boys, separated in spring 2020. Co-parenting through pandemic restrictions and lockdowns elongated and complicated the process, and when Henry texted that December, asking how his former colleague and friend was doing, Hillary filled him in.

Henry was instantly sympathetic. He offered to listen, asked how she was coping, and how the boys were doing. Soon they were texting memes and music and movie suggestions, making plans to hang out as friends.

Their first kiss came months later at Mel’s Funway Park in Litchfield, N.H. Henry remembers Hillary’s hugs had begun to feel different around that time: “It felt like we were two pieces of a puzzle that are meant to go together.”

Hillary, now 38, and Henry, 35, married on July 26 at Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club in Dover, N.H., with 85 guests.

She walked down the aisle to a live strings arrangement of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” with her parents on each arm. Her sons, now 15, swapped with their grandparents at the aisle midpoint to join their mom on her path to the altar.

Henry had asked that they forgo the popular trend of a “first look” — when the photographer helps stage a private pre-ceremony moment for the couple see each other in their wedding attire for the first time. So Hillary’s ceremony entrance was the first time they saw each other on their wedding day.

“She looked so beautiful, and that’s when I stopped being nervous,” Henry remembers. “She looked so happy. She couldn’t stop smiling.”

“I felt like a kid on Christmas morning … I was grinning from ear-to-ear,” Hillary confirms. ”I had practiced all those very demure smiles — but no, I was just a grinning goofball.”

Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s new weddings column.

Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at rachel.raczka@globe.com.