After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
The rain had been falling on Manhattan since four o’clock with the dull conviction of a city councilman reading a prepared statement, and by seven Vera Lindqvist had given up on the idea of an umbrella and resigned herself to being, for once, an inelegant woman.
She was thirty-nine, a conservator of rare bindings, and she had spent the afternoon persuading a seventeenth-century atlas not to fall apart in her hands. Grand Central was on her way home, more or less, and she cut through it as she always did, because the main concourse on a wet night is the last great public living room in New York: the commuters steaming gently, the constellations on the ceiling running backward as they have for a century, everyone briefly dignified by the architecture.
It was in the low tiled arch outside the Oyster Bar ramp — the Whispering Gallery, where a word spoken into one corner travels the curve of the vault and arrives, intact and intimate, in the opposite one — that a man’s voice said, quite distinctly, into her ear: “I think you dropped your glove.”
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