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Every time she tells it, Julie Ann Jones gets wide-eyed.

She’s told her friends, acquaintances, the “Today” show, even the mayor of New York. You know, Michael Bloomberg.

She just can’t believe it. And you know, neither can I.

Here’s her story:

Julie Ann clips coupons, scours for bargains and pinches so many pennies her friends say, “Julie Ann, you could pinch the beard off Abe Lincoln.”

But after going through a divorce, she wanted to create a memory with her only son. She and her 11-year-old daughter, Erica, had gone on adventures together. But not she and her 15-year-old son, Kyle, and she knew before she could blink, he’d be grown up and gone.

So, she splurged. She created a trip they both could enjoy — a three-day getaway to New York City in August, right before school started, where they could shop, eat, tour and take in Kyle’s favorite Broadway show, “Spamalot.’’

But on their last day, after a morning of shopping, eating and seeing the set of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” Julie Ann reached for her wallet in their hotel room. It was gone.

She looked under the couch, under the bed, in the cabinets, in the drawers, just any place where she thought she could have put it.

Nothing.

She called the front desk, the cops, the last store where she shopped.

Nothing.

She panicked. She knew that no ID, no credit cards and no money meant no way she and her son, a sophomore at Weaver Academy, could get back to Greensboro without a big-time headache.

Then, her cell phone rang.

“I just got a strange call from a guy in New York,” her neighbor told her. “He told me he found your wallet.”

Enter Brian Hightower, a 28-year-old single father.

That morning, he grabbed a pizza slice from Pronto Pizzeria and played the state’s Mega Millions lottery, wishing for his millions, when he saw a slender black wallet on the cooler.

He has lost his wallet twice. And being a native New Yorker, he knew the hassle. He also knew what would happen at Pronto. If he called out to customers, everyone would claim it. And if he called out to the employees and left it behind the counter for someone to claim, it could vanish.

So, he took the wallet and played cyberdetective.

He had some down time when he returned to NBC Studios, where he works as a production assistant for “Access Hollywood.” He hopped on the Internet and found the home number of Julie Ann and her neighbors.

Four neighbors hung up on him. But not the fifth.

Immediately, Julie Ann called Hightower and arranged a meeting at lunchtime at the always-crowded Rockefeller Plaza.

“But how will I find you?” she asked.

“I’ll be in a blue button down and jeans,” Hightower told her. “And don’t be alarmed. I’ll be the young black man.”

When they met, she offered him a reward several times. And every time, he declined. Emotionally drained, she stuffed $40 into his front pocket and told him as she cried, “You don’t know what this means to me.”

The story doesn’t end here. Right after Christmas, Julie Ann found Brian Hightower on facebook.com. She wanted to thank him again, and she did, in between exclamation marks, in which she called him “truly an amazing person.”

But what she didn’t know was this: Hightower was spending his first Christmas without his 5-year-old daughter, Amaris, when he read that message from Julie Ann, that message from out of the blue.

That’s when it hit him.

“It was an incredibly difficult time for me,’’ Hightower said Monday.

“But you know, when you do a good deed in this world, and it’s funny how karma does find you.’’

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com