“Do you, though?” Max didn’t seem like the kind of person who got his heart broken. In order to get your heart broken, stuff had to stick to begin with.

He smirked. “I do not. I was trying to be magnanimous.” He cocked his head as he looked into the distance. “But I do know what it’s like to have someone in your life who has more power over you than you can perhaps explain.”

As she was about to ask him what he meant, he pointed to a brass quintet on the edge of the plaza playing “Good King Wenceslas.” They slowed down as they approached the musicians. “Is this suitably Christmasey?” he asked.

She let the warm, rich brass notes wash over her. “Yes. It’s perfect.” They watched in silence for a few moments, and when the song was done, she said, “I guess my point is that this year I actually feel like doing the schmoopy Christmas stuff. Street musicians! The Nutcracker! I was thinking I might walk over to Bergdorf’s and look at the windows.”

“A fine plan.” He dropped a fifty-dollar bill in the open instrument case in front of the quartet.

“You don’t have to come with me,” she said, aware anew of the gulf between them. He was passing out fifty-dollar bills like they were quarters, and she was delighted by a ballet that was, essentially, for children. “I don’t want to subject you to any more Christmas-related torture. Or any more monologues about my poor judgment when it comes to husbands.”

“I’m going over there anyway. I’m at the Four Seasons.”

“Of course you are.” They set off, and after they crossed Broadway, she said, “You want to cut across the bottom of the park?”

“Your wish is my command.”

The snow crunched beneath their feet as they entered the park. “Did you grow up on Long Island?” he asked.

“No. My parents only moved there a few years ago, after my dad retired. I grew up in Sunnyside, Queens. My mom taught at my high school, and my dad commuted to Manhattan.”

“What prompted the move?”

“I don’t think it was any one thing. They both love the city, but they were getting tired of the stairs—we lived on the top floor of a walk-up—and tired of fighting for parking. And my dad wanted to be near the water—he’s big into clamming.”

“Clamming? Is that . . . fishing but for clams?”

“Yes. You dig them up, though.” She shrugged. “He kind of randomly got into it after he retired, and he was always getting up at the crack of dawn and driving out to wherever they were supposed to be good that day. My mom wasn’t quite ready to retire, but she got a teaching job in Huntington, which is a town on the North Shore, and that was that.”

“You’re close to them?”