I Do!: Melissa Mallardi and Pete Mott

Melissa Mallardi and Pete Mott almost missed each other.

It was June 2015 and Mott — a fly-fishing outfitter who had just returned to Colorado from a guiding trip in Wyoming — was at a Whole Foods store near Vail when he spotted Mallardi in the produce aisle.

“I was just completely struck by how pretty she was,” he recalled.

He kept shopping and eventually wound up at checkout. But standing in line, he said he thought to himself, “You’re an idiot if you don’t talk to her.” So, he left the line and wandered the store until he found Mallardi in the granola aisle.

“We got into this whole conversation about granola,” said Mallardi, who grew up in Bayville but was working for a mountaineering company in Colorado at the time.

Mallardi, now 35, said she initially turned Mott down when he asked her to dinner but gave him her business card. He said he emailed her the next day. When she responded, he gave her his phone number and, on July 1, they finally met up for a full-moon float down the Eagle River. They talked for hours.

“The connection was so real and so vibrant and so authentic,” Mott, 53, said.

The couple’s relationship was tested early, when — nine months after they started dating — Mott’s 12-year-old son was diagnosed with brain and spinal cancer.

“I could have left then,” Mallardi said. But instead, she said, the diagnosis taught her a valuable lesson about relationships: “It makes you realize it’s not always going to be easy. It’s not always going to be fun. . . . I feel very blessed and lucky to have learned that lesson very early on.”

For his part, Mott said, “She dropped everything. Everything. And she stood by our sides and supported us through everything. . . . Those are things you never forget.”

Mott’s son has since recovered and is in college. In April 2017, Mott proposed to Mallardi in Las Vegas, after they had finished an “intense” three-week rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Officially married in 2020, they postponed their wedding celebration due to the pandemic and because Mallardi’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. They held their wedding on Dec. 30, 2023, at the Country House restaurant in Stony Brook.

“There’s nothing like my wife,” Mott said. “I can’t even tell you how wonderful my life is with her in it.”