Ruby nodded. "You're easy to see," she said simply. "You're the reddest thing in the whole station."
Petra laughed, really laughed this time, a loud surprised sound that bounced off the marble, and two people on the next bench looked over. "That," she said, "is exactly the point."
"Why?" asked Ruby, who never let a thing go by.
Petra hesitated. She looked at Iris, who had found a loose thread on Ruby's mitten and was absorbed in tucking it back into the weave with the delicate, unhurried precision of someone who had mended a great many mittens in her life. Then Petra looked at James, and something in her face decided something.
"Because last April," she said, quietly, "she stopped knowing my face."
She said it lightly. James had heard people say things lightly before. He had said a few himself.
"It was a Tuesday," Petra went on. "I came down for breakfast and she was sitting at the kitchen table, and she looked up and said, very politely, 'Can I help you?' And she was scared. I'd lived in that house with her since I was fourteen. She raised me. She taught me to play the piano on the same upright I teach on now. And she was scared of me, in my own kitchen, in my bathrobe." Petra smoothed the red coat over her knees. "Anyway. A week after that I was going out in the rain and I put on my old red raincoat. And she saw me at the door and her whole face changed and she said, 'Oh, there's the girl in red. She'll get me home.' Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like I was someone she'd been waiting for." Petra shrugged. "So now I wear red. All of it, every day. She doesn't know who I am, but she knows red. Red means somebody's coming for her. Red means she's found." She held up one foot in its red canvas sneaker and regarded it with distaste. "I own eleven red sweaters. I hate red. I have always hated red. I look like a fire hydrant that got lost on its way to a funeral."
"You look nice," Ruby said loyally.
"Thank you, Ruby. You're a liar, but thank you."
James found that he was smiling, which seemed impossible, given everything. He found too that he was looking at her, the woman in red, at her freckled tired face and the scar through her eyebrow, in a way he had not looked at anyone for a long time, and that it was unsettling, like stepping off an escalator onto a floor that doesn't move.
"Fitzhugh!"