It was July 2008, and Elijah Bland, a neo-soul singer-songwriter, needed a female backup singer for his musical group, the Soulcentric Band. Half a dozen women responded to the Craigslist want ad he’d posted. But none were right.

Jay Gomel, then Soulcentric’s guitarist, said: “Some couldn’t sing on pitch. Patrice came in and blew it all away.”

Although Ms. Covington, who hails from Norfolk, Va., had been in New York for only three months, she brought with her considerable regional theater and national tour experience.

Mr. Bland had an impressive creative résumé of his own; he was a self-taught musician, a graphic designer and the producer of his two albums.

He invited Ms. Covington to audition for him in the atrium lobby of a Times Square hotel. Before the meeting, however, he listened to a demo recording on Ms. Covington’s Web site. It left him so certain of her credentials that when they met he hired her without so much as a note being sung.

As they got to know each other in the band, they learned that both were in other relationships, neither of which had been going well. “We were just hanging out as friends,” said Mr. Bland, now 28, “and I was trying to help her through her struggles. My relationship was falling apart. Hers was falling apart.”

It was a friendship that Ms. Covington quickly came to value. “I was really excited to have a male friend that was straight,” she said, “and wasn’t trying to get with me.”

But those around them began to suspect that Mr. Bland had a crush. “He came to her apartment to pick her up for rehearsal,” said Evelyn Addo-Wallace, a friend of Ms. Covington. “I thought, Why’s he picking her up when he’s not picking anyone else up? He came all the way to Harlem from New Jersey. I said, ‘Honey, this is something else.’ ”

When the couple performed together, they seemed to click. One of Mr. Bland’s songs, a duet, is called “Sugar High” and is about being “high” on a mental connection with someone.

“Every time we did it, it became more and more real,” Mr. Bland recalled.

One day, a month after they met, Mr. Bland, a native of Hackensack, N.J., came to Manhattan to spend time with Ms. Covington. They sat on a bench in Columbus Circle. “We were talking about all the ‘stuff’ we were going through with the other guy and other girl,” Ms. Covington, 27, recalled. “I realized we each had what the other one wanted. Neither of us said anything, but I later found out he felt the same way.”

She broke off her other relationship not long after that. Then, just before a gig in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, they were walking down the street with their “arms around each other’s shoulders in a friendly way,” Mr. Bland recalled. “I remember smelling her hair. It was kind of intoxicating.”

They sang “Sugar High” that night. In the car after the performance, Mr. Bland, in the front passenger seat with Ms. Covington behind him, named his tune. “I got this text message from him,” recalled Ms. Covington, “that said: ‘I can’t take it any more. I have to tell you this. I think that you’re beautiful inside and out and I would love the chance to make you happy the way you deserve to be.’ ”

Pleased and surprised, she replied, “Are we supposed to start dating now or … ?”

For their first date, they arranged to meet at an A-train stop in Harlem at 10 a.m. for what Mr. Bland promised would be a surprise. But Ms. Covington, not a morning person, overslept. He tried calling and sending her text messages from the station entrance for an hour.

“I kept thinking, There’s got to be a reason I’m still here,” he said.

Ms. Covington woke at 11 o’clock. Horrified, she called him immediately, jumped out of bed and ran out without showering, applying makeup or doing her hair.

Unfazed by the delay, Mr. Bland took her to Madame Tussauds on 42nd Street, which Ms. Covington had been talking about visiting. Once there, they hammed it up for photos beside wax figures of Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder and President George W. Bush, and then ate at the McDonald’s nearby, which Ms. Covington described as “the most expensive McDonald’s in the country.”

At the end of the day, Ms. Addo-Wallace recalled, “Patrice called me and said, ‘Evelyn, I think I found the one.’ ”