With a sigh, she headed off behind his impatient back, her vision blurring again with tears. Why couldn't she ever do anything right?

Sure enough, by the time they stepped out into the cool October air, the line of cabs that would have gathered at the curb for the post-performance crowd had vanished. "Blast," Roger muttered under his breath, looking up and down Broadway.

But the Great White Way was quiet tonight, or at least this stretch of it was. The university had a significant chunk of the street blocked off with a construction project up around 120th, and the city's own orange-cone mania had similarly struck down at 103rd, sealing off most of the street there. The cabbies, who had enough trouble just battling regular Manhattan traffic, had taken to avoiding these particular twenty blocks entirely.

Of course, they could always walk over to Amsterdam and flag down something there. But Amsterdam turned one-way-north at 110th, which would force the cabby to head farther east to Columbus, which was currently handling much of the Broadway traffic in addition to its own. It probably wouldn't get them home any sooner than just walking the twenty blocks, not to mention the expense involved. There was always the subway, of course, but Caroline had an absolute phobia about riding it after dark.

But to walk would mean giving in.

"I suppose we could walk," Caroline offered timidly from beside him, her voice sounding like someone easing her way onto thin ice.

"I suppose we could," Roger echoed, hearing the hardness in his own voice. That had been their pretheater argument: a brief staking out of turf on Caroline's current favorite subject of exercise, and how both of them needed more of it.

And once she got an idea or crusade into her head, there was no getting it out of her. Three cheers for the underdog, four cheers for the noble cause, damn the torpedoes, and full speed ahead.

He frowned sideways at her in sudden suspicion. Could she have lost her ring back there on purpose, staging the whole thing to force them to walk home like she wanted?