"Why not?"
"You'll lose a step," said Gina, and rang the bell.
They ran. They thundered down the stairs like a pair of teenagers, Gina in front and Graham behind her, missing the last step and grabbing the banister, and they burst out onto the sidewalk on Thirty-first Street and kept running, half a block, all the way to the shadow of the parked bread truck by the alley, where they stopped and pressed themselves against its cold side, gasping, steam pouring out of them.
Above the bakery, a door opened. Light spilled down the stairs.
There was a silence. And then a sound came floating out into the snowy dark — a child's shriek, pure and astonished and absolutely joyful, the kind of sound a person makes perhaps four or five times in a whole life — and after it, very faintly, through the open door, a tinny little music-box voice singing, Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.
Gina put her face against Graham's peacoat.
She was laughing. She was also crying, a little, and wheezing from the run, and her mascara was definitely running, and none of it mattered. She thought of a big man in a work coat bent over in the front seat of a station wagon, laughing so hard he couldn't get the key in the ignition. That's a win, Gina. That's a win.
"Was that it?" Graham said, into her hair. He sounded stunned. "Is that what it's like?"