As she stood watching the polished-steel elevator doors closing, Elaine made an even more disturbing realization. She was one of “these people.”

When Ravi arrived for his shift, she made a hasty explanation he clearly didn’t understand, then called a cab for herself. She slid into the back seat, shivering as her thighs touched the hard plastic upholstery. She tucked her warm designer coat more securely around her and thought for a moment. The fact was, she had no clue where she wanted to go.

She wanted to find Tony. She wanted to tell him that seeing him again had caused her to step back and take a hard, painful look at her life. She’d left the best party in town and put her career in jeopardy to work for an hour as a doorman. All because she’d seen him again and realized the dream was still there, hiding, waiting for the right moment. So she was either losing her marbles or turning into a different person.

She felt the driver eyeing her in the rearview mirror. “Brooklyn,” she said. Ordinarily, even an hour ago, she wouldn’t have given a second glance at a cabbie. Now she frowned as she detected something—a flicker of recognition?—in his glance.

“Got it.” He turned south on Roosevelt Drive. “You probably want to be more specific.”

She thought hard. “Do you know of a Catholic church in Brooklyn? One that holds midnight mass?”

He narrowed his eyes in the mirror. “That’d narrow it down to a couple dozen.”

“Maybe I’ll think of the name on the way over.”

As it turned out, she had plenty of time to think because traffic came to a standstill a few blocks north of the bridge.

“Great,” Elaine said. “I’m going to throw myself at a man for the second time in my life, and I get stuck in a traffic jam.”

“The second time in your life? What happened the first time?”

“He didn’t show.” The chime of bells shimmered from the radio speaker. There was a silvery quality to the chimes that made her shiver.

“I thought he explained all that.” Something in his voice caught her attention, and she studied him with more than passing interest. He was just a cabbie, she told herself. He wore a cap with earflaps and a bright red muffler.

The back of her neck prickled. Clutching the back of the seat, she leaned forward to read the driver ID affixed to the meter box. Lawrence E. Simms.

“Larry?” she said.

At last, they reached the bridge. The normally busy span was oddly deserted. “That’s me.”

“Larry the elf? Larry the Zamboni driver?”

The cabbie seemed not to hear her as he cranked down his window and stuck his head out. “Hey, lady. Do you see what I see? Oh, man.”