"He's the one who told her what year it was," James said, and pulled his arm free, not roughly but definitely, and turned, and Ruby was gone too.
His heart stopped. That was not a figure of speech. He felt it stop, felt the long stunned pause in his chest, and then he saw the purple hat with its pom-pom bobbing away through the crowd toward the concourse passage, low down among the coats, weaving through the reindeer-antlered choir children as if she were one of them, and his heart started again, hard and wrong, like an engine turned over in the cold.
"Ruby!"
He ran.
He would not remember all of it later, only pieces, the way you remember a fall. The flat fluorescent brightness of the concourse. A woman's coffee arcing out of her cup in a perfect brown parabola as she jumped out of his way. The public address voice, unbothered, enormous, announcing that Amtrak train number five, the California Zephyr, service to Denver, Salt Lake City, Reno, Sacramento, and Emeryville, was now in final boarding on Track Twenty-Six, final boarding, all ticketed passengers. And Ruby's purple hat, ahead of him, and then Ruby herself, stopped dead in the middle of the concourse with her sketchbook clutched to her chest, turning in a slow circle with her eyes enormous.
He grabbed her. He didn't mean to grab so hard. He lifted her clear off the floor and held her against him, and she let him for one second and then pushed at his chest with both hands.
"Dad. Dad! Put me down, I'm looking."
"You don't run away from me. You do not ever—"
"I wasn't running away, I was following." She twisted in his arms and pointed. "She went after the red hat."
"What red hat?"
"The red hat man. With the cart." Ruby's voice was high and fast. "She saw him and she went after him, I saw her, she was crying and then she saw him and she stopped crying and went after him. Because it was red, Dad. Because red means—" She didn't finish. She didn't need to. She was pointing at the gate for Track Twenty-Six, the far one, the western gate, where the Zephyr was boarding, where a line of passengers with roller bags was shuffling past the agent's podium and on down the long ramp toward the platform.