Beside her, Graham shifted the sleeping baby on his shoulder and reached out with his free hand, and she took it, black leather glove in his bare palm, the way she had taken it for seven years now. His fingers were warm. They were always warm. He had never once, in seven years, let go of her first.
"There's a rule," Gina told her son, "that Grandpa Sal taught me. Never let go first. The one who lets go first loses."
Sal frowned up at her, thinking about this with great seriousness. "But you let go."
"I did."
"So did you lose?"
Above them the great glass ornaments turned slowly in the warm air, catching the snowlight from the windows, gold and crimson and blue. Somewhere a toy train went around and around its track, whistling at every turn. Gina looked at her husband, and at the small sleeping weight on his shoulder, and at the boy holding her hand, and thought of a box sliding back and forth on a shelf seven years ago, and of what it had taken to open her hand.
"Grandpa Sal was right about almost everything," she said. "Not about that."
She squeezed Graham's hand, and he squeezed back, and they went down the aisle together toward the escalator, and the cocoa, and the rest of the day's hunting.