Months after Bradley Carbone met Barbara Torasso, he broke his neck snowboarding. A long recovery brought them closer together.

By Tammy La Gorce

Barbara Torasso was sure Bradley Carbone had lost interest in her after he abruptly stopped communicating in late February 2014. The two, who had met several months earlier, were planning a March snowboarding vacation in Vail, Colo., and he was no longer answering her texts.

“I started telling my girlfriends, this guy is ghosting me,” she said. “I said, ‘You know that trip we were supposed to go on? He’s bailing on me.’”

She was too angry, though, to slink away quietly. “I kept texting and calling him,” she said. On Feb. 28, she got a call back.

Mr. Carbone’s friend Mans Ericson contacted her from Mr. Carbone’s phone. First, he told her to stop calling. Then he told her Mr. Carbone wasn’t answering his phone because he couldn’t: The man she had been gradually falling in love with had been in a horrific snowboarding accident in Vermont that left him quadriplegic.

Ms. Torasso, 39, and Mr. Carbone, 40, met on June 21, 2013, at a summer solstice party at the McCarren Hotel and Pool, now Coda Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. Jusepet Rodriguez, a work colleague who goes by “Juice,” introduced them. Ms. Torasso was visiting New York from Boston, where she was the global marketing manager at Reebok. Mr. Carbone ran the trend marketing department at the Adidas headquarters in Manhattan.

“Bradley had the charm of a beach boy, with these blue eyes and bleached-out hair,” Ms. Torasso said. “I was like, ‘I want to talk to him and be close to him and listen to everything he has to say.’” When both left the party that night after hours of talking, they felt they had been on a first date.

Neither tried to set up a second one, though. “There was a kind of romance around this fast life idea at the time,” Mr. Carbone said. If the stars and their schedules aligned in a way that allowed them to see each other again, so be it, they thought. If it didn’t, that was OK, too. “My approach to life was, work hard, play hard, see everything, take everything life has to offer,” he said.

Ms. Torasso lived fast, too. She would often spend weekends in New York, where she had friends from her native Italy. Fashion events, art shows and concerts in far-off cities filled her social calendar. But she had been drawn to Mr. Carbone and was glad they exchanged phone numbers before she left the McCarren Hotel that June. “It wasn’t like I was sitting at home waiting for Bradley to call me,” she said. “But I remember telling my girlfriends about this guy who lives in New York. I had a soft spot for him.”

By the end of June, their connection had deepened, courtesy of a few more casual meet-ups at clubs and parties in Manhattan. In July, both had trips to Berlin scheduled for a fashion trade show. “We were like, OK, cool, I’ll meet you there,” she said.

The rendezvous in Germany brought them closer still, but both left the door to their relationship wide open. Back home, “for a month or two our schedules didn’t line up,” Mr. Carbone said. The romance remained casual. They would only see each other a handful more times before Mr. Carbone’s accident.

Mr. Carbone grew up in Quogue, a village in Southampton, N.Y., with a younger brother, Kurt, and their parents, Meg and Timothy, who were schoolteachers. In summers, the family moved to the Swordfish Beach Club in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., which Mr. Carbone’s father used to manage. Mr. Carbone and his brother spent the long days surfing, fishing and lifeguarding.

The family packed up every winter weekend and drove to Vermont, where his parents were part-time ski instructors on Okemo Mountain. “It was a very dynamic life, beach in the summer, winter in the mountains,” Mr. Carbone said. Both boys learned to ski as toddlers and started snowboarding as adolescents.

Skiing defined Ms. Torasso’s childhood, too. Born in Turin, Italy, a 45-minute drive from the Alps, she was racing competitively by age 9. “That was really the best part of my youth,” she said. “I traveled all over Europe with my ski team. It was my first love.”

Fashion came second. Ms. Torasso, the only child of Carla Torasso, a high school French teacher, and Giovanni Torasso, a telephone company executive, studied economics at the University of Torino in Italy and at Jean Moulin Lyon III University in France before earning a master’s degree in fashion and design management at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan in 2007.

Two internships shaped her career. First, she worked for Vivienne Westwood in London, then at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. “That’s where the idea came to me that I wanted to work at a company that allowed me to merge fashion with sports,” she said.

In 2012, she was transferred to Boston to work for Reebok, which was owned by her employer at the time, Adidas. “I left everything behind — my friends, my family — to embark on this new adventure,” she said.

Mr. Carbone graduated from Boston College in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in communications and earned an M.B.A. from N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business in 2013. He liked fashion, too, particularly the kind that informed the surfing and snowboarding cultures he grew up around. He was an intern at Complex Magazine in New York after college.

At Adidas, where he was hired in 2011, he organized promotional music, art and fashion events. His job was to keep the brand “cool and relevant,” he said. Ms. Torasso and Mr. Carbone, who now live on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, still work in fashion. She is head of Americas at Basic Properties America, the U.S. subsidiary of BasicNet, an Italian company that acquires and relaunches fashion and lifestyle brands. He is a partner and the managing editor of Sneeze Magazine, a skateboarding and street culture publication distributed at skate shops and clothing boutiques worldwide.

He was with his parents at Okemo Mountain in late in February 2014 when he broke his neck snowboarding. At Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, where he was airlifted, he had emergency spinal cord surgery and spent three weeks in intensive care.

News of the accident, courtesy of the call from Mr. Ericson, shocked Ms. Torasso. She was determined to see Mr. Carbone. But Mr. Ericson wouldn’t tell her where he was. “He said Bradley needed to be kept calm, and I was too emotional,” she said. She bypassed Mr. Ericson, calling every hospital in the region and asking to be patched into Bradley Carbone’s room. When her call was transferred at Dartmouth Hitchcock, she hung up and got in her car.

On the drive from Boston, she called Mr. Ericson to say she was coming. He told her to turn around. “I was crying, a total mess, and he said, ‘You can’t be here in this state of distress,’” she said. She acquiesced, and turned back. “I didn’t want to put anybody in a bad situation.”

After the three weeks at Dartmouth Hitchcock, Mr. Carbone had an additional surgery in New York, then was treated at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, N.J.

The months that followed saw Mr. Carbone surrounded by an unflagging support network, his mother at its helm. “She brought a little grill to the rehab center, and she would cook him every meal on it,” Ms. Torasso said. “She organized a cycle of Bradley’s friends coming through to stay with him morning, afternoon and evening, so there was never a time someone wasn’t there.”

The shuffle of friends included Ms. Torasso, who moved to New York in March 2014 to take a marketing job at the fashion trade show Capsule and to be nearer to Mr. Carbone.

By October 2014, Mr. Carbone had adjusted to life in a wheelchair well enough to move back to the Lower East Side and return to work at Adidas. The following summer, Ms. Torasso moved in with him. Months earlier, they had rekindled their romance while spending time at the Lower East Side club Happy Ending, where an elevator enabled Mr. Carbone to gather with his still-strong army of New York friends.

Ms. Torasso’s approach to life, so similar to his own, solidified their commitment to each other. “The initial attraction came from this aggressive love for life we shared,” he said. Her devotion when his life and mobility changed felt familiar in its intensity. “The thread that runs through this relationship is, we do everything as fully as possible.”

That included grieving the loss of Meg Carbone, who died of chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2019. Ms. Carbone had become like a second mother to Ms. Torasso. “She fought like a lioness to keep her son alive,” she said. “She was an inspiration to me.”

When Mr. Carbone proposed to Ms. Torasso at their apartment on Aug. 20, 2021, he knew his mother would have approved. “It was something she was really hoping would happen,” he said.

On Aug. 16, Ms. Torasso and Mr. Carbone had a private wedding ceremony performed by a priest at an undisclosed Long Island church. To avoid the marriage penalties faced by couples in which one partner is disabled, the union was ceremonial rather than legal. This shielded Ms. Torasso from future financial responsibility and allowed Mr. Carbone to retain the disability benefits he needed to afford care. “The chances of me having medical complications down the line is very real,” he said. “We had to plan for that.”

Mr. Carbone and Ms. Torasso celebrated their union again on Sept. 26, this time with 300 friends — the protective Mr. Ericson among them — and family members at the Boom Boom Room, at the top of the Standard Hotel, in Manhattan.

Before their friends arrived, Ms. Torasso’s father walked her down a short hallway to Mr. Carbone as 100 family members looked on. “He kissed me, and then he shook Bradley’s hand and gave me to Bradley,” she said. Ms. Torasso was in tears.

“I was over the moon,” she said.