"You're green."
"I'm off duty." She looked down at herself and then up at him, and she was nervous, he could see it, and trying not to be. "Mrs. Agarwal's daughter is home from college, she's with Bird all day, and I thought—I don't know what I thought. I thought you'd come out of that meeting and you'd come here. I don't know why I thought that." She was talking fast. "I didn't want to wear red. I wanted to see if you'd know me if I didn't. Which is a crazy thing to want. Which is a crazy test to give somebody. I'm sorry. How did it go? Did they—"
"Final warning," he said. "I keep the job. I lose Saturdays."
She let out a breath. "Okay. Okay. That's—that's not nothing. That's a lot of something." And then, because she was Petra, and he would learn this about her, that she could not ever let a hard thing sit without trying to carry it somewhere: "Then bring her to me."
"What?"
"Saturdays. Bring Ruby to me. I teach all day, she can have a lesson, she can do her homework at the dining room table, she can draw. Mrs. Agarwal's there, I'm there, Bird's there." She hesitated. "Bird loves her. Even when she doesn't know who anybody is, she knows that little girl. She asked for her on Tuesday. She said, where's the little plum." Petra pushed her hair back with both gloved hands, the way she had in the Great Hall a week ago, twenty yards off, before she came walking up at that ordinary unhurried pace. "I'm not saying it's a solution. I'm not saying it's anything. It's a dining room table in Berwyn on Saturdays. But it's a place where somebody will always come for her."
He looked at her. He thought about the four Saturdays when he had seen a purple hat and believed that was the same as seeing his daughter. He thought of Ruby's sketchbook full of a woman in red, again and again, always coming, and of Iris's red coat folded all those months in the bottom of a suitcase, carried every time, worn without being worn. He thought about how you could spend your whole life making yourself easy to find for someone, and how almost nobody ever noticed you doing it, and how this woman had noticed. How she had come here in green to see whether he would notice her back.
"I knew you," he said. "In the green. From the top of the stairs."
"You did not. I saw your face. You looked right past me."
"For a second," he admitted. "Then I knew you."
"How?"