The snow fell in slow, deliberate flakes, the kind that made the whole world look carefully arranged, as if someone with a soft brush and infinite patience had decided that New York's northern corridor deserved a Christmas postcard. Claire Whitmore walked the platform beneath a row of amber lampposts, their light pooling like spilled honey on the wet boards. Her oversized white faux fur coat moved with her, a pale comet against the dark winter evening. The high-neck top beneath it was white, the tailored pants white, the gloves white; only the small gold handbag flashed warmer color as it bounced against her hip. Her long, straight, middle-parted platinum blonde hair caught every lamp as she passed, and the glamorous architecture of her face—arched brows, black winged eyeliner, lashes heavy as theater curtains, soft pink blush, dark pink liner framing lips of a lighter pink—made the cold look like a choice she had made for aesthetic reasons.
Samuel Drake stood near a pillar with his paper ticket folded once in his gloved hand, camel overcoat open over a cream cable-knit sweater, buzzcut dusted with snow that melted almost at once against the warmth of his scalp. The light stubble along his jaw made him look less like a man waiting for a train than like a man who had forgotten he was waiting for anything at all. He saw her before she saw him. Then she saw him. The smirk arrived first—small, knowing, the kind of smile that said she had already invented three versions of him and liked at least two. She glanced back over her shoulder as she passed, flirty as a dare, and the amber light made a temporary halo of the snow in her hair.
He tried. God help him, he tried.
"Hey... yeah, hey, hi. Merry train. I mean, have a good-"
His brown leather glove slipped. The ticket fluttered, caught a draft from the arriving locomotive's sigh, and nearly vanished under a porter's cart.
"Oh crap!"