“Are you all right?” someone else asks. A teenager has her phone out and is filming her humiliation

On the day that Rivi Greenberg finds out that her father is dead, she is imprisoned by her own sheitel in the middle of Madison Avenue.

It doesn’t come off. That’s her sole comfort.

Every workday, Rivi wears a wig, perfectly set and styled in businesslike waves; indistinguishable from her colleagues’ hair unless you know what to look for. When she strides through the streets of New York, no one looks at her twice. She dresses the part: mahogany blazer, skirt, blouse beneath the blazer, nylon stockings, heels. When she argues in court, only her name gives her away.

It’s the heels that cause the problem today. Yesterday had been unseasonably warm, the sort of warm that makes you disbelieve that it’s winter and that the children complain about bitterly. It’s not fair! It was so cold yesterday! We deserve snow! But it had been warm enough that the precipitation had been sheets of rain, gusting down upon the suburban streets until the dip in the road had become a pond.

Today is freezing again, and there’s a sheen of ice everywhere. Rivi watches it as she walks, careful to avoid the slipping. But when she moves to the side to allow a crowd of tourists past, her heel lands on a glistening patch of ice on the sidewalk and sends her flying.

She would have landed flat on her back on the ground if not for a piece of metal poking out of the side of a bus stop. It snags on a knot in her wig, catches it, and doesn’t let go. Rivi’s sheitel clips hold tight — straining at her hair in the process — and she’s flung painfully against the side of the stop, her hair trapping her in place.

There are people crowding around her. The best-kept secret of New York natives is that they’re surprisingly considerate, but Rivi does not appreciate that right now. Someone reaches to help her up. “Are you all right?” someone else asks. A third — a teenager, of course — has her phone out and is filming her humiliation. Rivi clasps a hand over her hair in chagrin. Her throat closes up and refuses words, lest something far more humiliating emerge.

Why does she insist on wearing a classy coat without a hood? She has no protection right now, nothing to conceal her predicament, and her sheitel is a tangled mess, disheveled and still trapped in that metal detritus. She lets her head fall back, feet grappling for solid ground, and stares up at the gray sky, framed by skyscrapers.

“Miss. Ma’am.” One of the onlookers is beginning to sound concerned. “Are you able to speak?”

And then, relief. “Give her a minute.” A woman crouches beside her, and she unknots Rivi’s sheitel with nimble fingers. “You’re free,” she says. “Go ahead, sit up.”

“Thank you.” Rivi has to summon every last bit of composure to flash a smile at the woman. “I really appreciate it.”

“No biggie,” the woman says, and she helps Rivi rise to her feet and then slips away, vanishing into the throng of rush hour traffic as though she’d been an angel on a mission to preserve Rivi’s dignity.