Brooke looked at her BlackBerry. “Between Tenth and Eleventh. That’s exactly where we are, isn’t it? Where is this place?” She saw a darting shadow out of the corner of her eye and yelped.

“Oh relax, Brooke. It’s much more scared of you than you are of it.” Nola waved off the rat spotting with a cocktail-ring-adorned hand.

Brooke hurried to cross the street, seeing that the even-numbered addresses they wanted were on the opposite side. “Easy for you to say. You could pierce its heart with one stomp of that heel. My dumpy flat boots put me at heightened risk.”

Nola laughed and scampered gracefully behind Brooke. “There, I think that’s it,” she said, pointing to the only building on the block that didn’t look condemned.

The girls followed a small staircase down from the sidewalk to a windowless basement door. Julian had explained that these kinds of showcases were constantly on the move, and music-biz people were always looking for the next hip place to help generate buzz, but still, she had been envisioning a venue somewhere that looked like a smaller version of Joe’s Pub. What was this? No line fanning out to the sidewalk. No marquee announcing the night’s talent. There wasn’t even the requisite sullen girl with a clipboard, petulantly telling everyone to take a step back and wait his turn.

Brooke felt a small wave of anxiety until she heaved open the vaultlike door, stepped inside, and was enveloped in a warm cocoon of semidarkness and low laughter and the subtle but unmistakable scent of marijuana. The entire space was the size of a large living room, and everything—the walls, the sofas, even the paneling on the small corner bar—was swathed in plush burgundy velvet. A single lamp rested atop the piano and cast a soft light onto the empty stool. Hundreds of tiny votives were magnified by the mirrored tabletops and ceiling, a look that somehow managed to be impossibly sexy without so much as a twinge of eighties-throwback.

The crowd looked like they had been hand-plucked from a poolside cocktail party in Santa Barbara and dropped in New York City. Forty or fifty mostly young and attractive people milled about, sipping from lowball glasses and exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke in long, languorous wafts. The men were dressed almost uniformly in jeans, and the few who still wore their daytime suits had ditched their ties and loosened their top buttons. Almost none of the women wore stilettos or the short, tight black cocktail dresses that made up the Manhattan uniform; instead, they were all roaming about in beautifully printed tunics and tinkling beaded earrings and jeans so perfectly worn in that Brooke actually yearned to strip out of her black sweater dress then and there. Some had hippie-chic headbands around their foreheads and beautiful hair falling to their waists. No one appeared the least bit self-conscious or stressed out—another Manhattan unlikelihood—which of course made Brooke doubly anxious. This was a far cry from Julian’s usual audiences. Who were all these people and why did each and every one of them look a thousand times better than she did?

“Breathe,” Nola whispered in her ear.

“If I’m this nervous, I can’t even imagine how Julian feels.”

“Come on, let’s find ourselves some drinks.” Nola flung her blond hair over her shoulder and held out a hand for Brooke, but before they could move through the crowd, Brooke heard a familiar voice.

“Red, white, or stronger?” Trent asked, magically appearing next to them. He was one of the only men in a suit and looked uncomfortable. It was probably his first time away from the hospital in weeks.

“Hey there!” Brooke said, hugging him around the neck. “You remember Nola, right?”

Trent smiled. “Of course I do.” He turned to Nola and kissed her on the cheek. There was something in his tone that said Of course I remember meeting you, because you randomly went home with my friend that night and he was very impressed with both your willingness and your creativity in the bedroom. But Trent was much too discreet to joke about it, even after all these years.

Not so with Nola. “How is Liam? God, he was fun,” she said with a huge smile. “Like, really fun.”

Trent and Nola exchanged knowing looks and laughed.

Brooke held up a hand. “Okay then. Trent, congratulations on the engagement! When do we get to meet her?” She couldn’t bring herself to say Fern’s name, didn’t trust herself to say it without laughing. What kind of name was Fern?

“Considering we are almost never not at the hospital at the same time, possibly not until the wedding.”

The bartender motioned to Trent, who turned to the girls.

“Red, please,” they said in unison, and all three watched as the bartender poured from a bottle of California cabernet. Trent handed them each a glass and downed his own in two swift swallows.

He turned to Brooke with a sheepish look on his face. “I don’t get out much.”

Nola excused herself to do a loop of the room.

Brooke smiled at Trent. “So tell me about her. Where’s the wedding going to be?”

“Well, Fern’s from Tennessee and has a huge family, so we’re probably just going to do it at her parents’ place. Next February, I think.”

“Wow, moving right along. Well, that’s great news.”

“Yeah, the only way we can be matched at the same place for our residencies is if we’re married.”

“So you’re both continuing on with gastro?”

“Yeah, that’s the plan. My interests are more in the scoping and testing area—they’re doing some incredibly high-tech things these days—but Fern is more a Crohn’s/celiac kind of person.” Trent paused for a moment and appeared to reflect on this before breaking into a wide smile. “She’s a great girl. I really think you’ll like her.”

“Hey, buddy!” Julian said, clapping Trent on the back. “Of course we’ll like her. She’s going to be your wife. How crazy is that?” Julian leaned over and kissed Brooke full on the lips. He tasted delicious, like chocolate mint, and just seeing him was reassuring.

Trent laughed. “Not as crazy as the fact that my socially stunted cousin has had himself a wife for five years now, but it’s up there.”

It was on nights like this that Brooke couldn’t be prouder to be Julian’s wife. He was wearing his uniform, unchanged even after all these years: white T-shirt, Levi’s, and a knit cap. The outfit couldn’t have been less exceptional, but it had come to signify pure sexiness to Brooke. The cap was Julian’s signature, the closest thing he had to a “look,” but only Brooke knew it was more than that. Just last year Julian had been crushed to discover the tiniest bald spot in the history of hair loss. Brooke tried to assure him that it was barely noticeable, but Julian would hear none of it. And truth be told, it may have gotten slightly bigger since he’d first pointed it out, although she’d never admit it.