He had his phone in his back pocket. He could call the number. He could find a way to step away and do it, or he could flag down one of the Amtrak police officers who did slow loops through the hall, or he could take her to the information desk and let the professionals handle it, which was surely the correct thing, the thing Ron Winnick would want, the thing the file would want. He reached for his phone with his free hand.
And across the hall, through the crowd, past the Christmas tree and the sleeping man with his milk and the toddler still testing the echo, a woman in red was running.
He saw her because it was impossible not to. She was red from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, a red knit hat and a long red wool coat flying open over a red sweater and red corduroys and, he would notice later with something like awe, red canvas sneakers. A red scarf streamed behind her. A red tote bag bounced on her shoulder, shedding sheet music onto the terrazzo behind her like breadcrumbs. She ran the way people run when they have already run a long way, and her eyes went from face to face to face across the Great Hall in quick desperate sweeps, a lighthouse beam turning, and then landed on the old woman on James's arm.
Everything in her changed. He watched it happen. Twenty yards off she slowed, all at once, as if she had hit a wall made of air. She stopped running. She took one long breath that lifted her shoulders up around her ears, let it out, pulled off her hat and pushed her hair back with both hands, put the hat back on. She straightened the red coat. And then she came toward them at an easy walk, an ordinary, unhurried, everything-is-fine Saturday walk, with a smile on her face that James could see was costing her a great deal to hold there.
The old woman saw her too. Her hand tightened on James's arm, not with fear, exactly. More like recognition that hadn't quite figured out yet what it was recognizing.
"Oh," Iris Vesely said. "It's the girl in red."
The woman in red came right up to them. Up close she was in her middle thirties, maybe, with a narrow, freckled face flushed blotchy from the cold and the running, and brown eyes that were bright and very tired, and a small white scar through one eyebrow. She did not look at Iris first. She looked at James. Then she leaned in, close, closer than a stranger ever leans, until her cheek almost touched his and he could smell cold air and something like rosin in her hair, and she whispered, very low, so low he felt it more than heard it:
"James."
He actually flinched. He couldn't help it. The suitcase bumped against his leg.
She kept going, still in that whisper, fast and urgent, her lips barely moving. "That's who you are right now. Please. She thinks you're my grandfather. I'm not going to tell you that you have to, but if you correct her she's going to come apart in the middle of this room, and I can't—" Her voice caught and steadied. "Just for ten minutes. You're James. Please."
He turned his head so his mouth was by her ear and whispered back, because it seemed to be the language they were speaking now.