“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your friend,” I point out.

Chaz looks defensive. “I’m not saying he’s a bad person. I’m just saying that I’ve known him a lot longer than you have, Lizzie, and he’s always had a problem with—well, let’s just say when the going gets tough, Luke has a habit of getting going. As in quitting.”

I’m appalled. “Because he put off medical school to become an investment banker, then realized he made a mistake? People do that, you know, Chaz. People make mistakes.”

“You don’t,” Chaz says. “I mean, you make mistakes. But not that kind. You’ve known what you’ve wanted to do since the day I met you. You’ve also known it was going to be hard, and that it would take a lot of sacrifice, and that you probably wouldn’t make a lot of money at it right away. But that never stopped you. You never gave up on your dream when the going got tough.”

I gape at him. “Chaz, have you even been in the same room with me for this entire conversation? I just got through telling you how I’m about to give up on my dream.”

“You just got through telling me how you were going to move home and figure out some other way to pursue it that doesn’t include New York City,” Chaz corrects me. “That’s different. Listen, Liz, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Luke’s a bad guy. I’m just saying I wouldn’t—”

“Bet on him to finish first if he were a horse and you were a betting man,” I finish for him impatiently. “Yes, I know, I heard you the first time. And I get what you’re saying, I guess. But you’re talking about the OLD Luke. Not the Luke he’s turned into, now that he has me to support him. People change, Chaz.”

“Not that much,” Chaz says.

“Yes,” I say. “They do. That much.”

“Can you give me empirical data to support that statement?” Chaz asks.

“No,” I say. Now I’m really getting impatient. I don’t know how Shari puts up with Chaz sometimes. Oh, sure, he’s cute, in a jockish kind of way. And he totally adores her, and is supposedly fantastic in bed (sometimes I think Shari shares a little too much). But what’s with the turned-around baseball caps? And the Can you give me the empirical data to support that statement?

“Then that,” Chaz goes on, “is a specious argument—”

What’s that Shakespeare saying?The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers? It should be,The first thing we do, let’s kill all the graduate students getting a Ph.D. in philosophy.

“Chaz!” I cut him off. “Do you want to help me measure your windows so I can go home and start on your curtains, or what?”

He glances at the windows. They are covered with hideous folding metal gates, in order to keep out the few remaining crackheads in the city, all of whom seem to live in his neighborhood, for some reason.

They are terrifically ugly. Even a guy should be able to see that.

“I guess,” he says, looking deflated. “It’s more fun arguing with you, though.”

“Well,I’m not having any fun,” I inform him.

He grins. “Okay. Curtains it is. And Lizzie.”

I’ve scooped up the measuring tape and am slipping off my shoes so I can climb up onto the radiator to measure. “What?”

“About the job. In my dad’s office. There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“You’re going to have to keep your mouth shut. I mean, about who you see and what you overhear in there. You’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s a law office. And they promise their clients total discretion—”

“God, Chaz,” I say, irritated all over again. “I can keep my mouth shut, you know.”

He just looks at me.

“If it’s important, I can, ” I insist. “Like, if my paycheck depends on it.”

“Maybe,” Chaz says, almost as if to himself, “recommending you for the job isn’t the best idea… ”

I throw the measuring tape at him.

Yes, I know. Everybody’s doing it. Well, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?

So stop letting your bra straps show!

I don’t care how much you paid for your over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder, it’s uncouth to force us to look at it (especially if the straps are graying or frayed—and ESPECIALLY on your wedding day)!

Keep your girls where they should be by having your wedding-gown specialist attach about an inch and a half of seam binding or a thread chain under the shoulder seam of your sleeve or strap. Then have her sew a ball snap to the free end of the guard, and a socket snap toward the neck edge.

Then snap your strap. It will be out of sight… and so will you!

LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS™

New York is a strange place. Things here can change in the blink of the eye. I guess that’s what they mean when they say a New York minute. Everything just seems to go faster here.

Like, you can be walking down a street that seems perfectly tree-lined and pleasant, and not even one block later, you suddenly find yourself in a trash-filled, graffitied seedy underbelly of a neighborhood, resembling something out of a crime scene on one of the Law and Order s. And all you’ve done is crossed a street.

So I guess, considering all this, I shouldn’t have been so amazed that in a forty-eight-hour period, I went from having no job in New York City to being the proud owner of two of them.

The interview with the human resources division of Chaz’s dad’s office is going well.Really well. It’s like a joke, actually. The harried-looking woman whose office I’m escorted into after waiting for nearly half an hour in the fancy lobby (they’d upgraded from gold-trimmed couches to deep-brown leather ones, which blended nicely with the dark wood paneling on the walls and rich green carpeting) asks me one or two pleasant questions about how I know Chaz—“From the dorm we all lived in in college,” I say, not mentioning that Shari and I had met him at an outdoor movie night sponsored by the student government of McCracken Hall, at which Chaz had been the one who’d started passing around a joint, causing us to refer to him for days afterward as the Joint Man… until Shari spied him eating breakfast in the dining hall by himself one morning, plunked herself down beside him, asked him his name, and by that evening had slept with him in his single in McCracken’s tower suites. Three times.

“Great,” Roberta, my interviewer, says, apparently not realizing she’s getting a less than complete relationship history from me. “We all love Charles. The summer he worked here in the mailroom, he had us all in stitches the whole time. He’s so funny.”

Yeah. Chaz is hilarious.

“It’s just too bad,” Roberta goes on wistfully, “that Charles didn’t choose the law. He has his dad’s same brilliant academic mind. When either of them starts arguing a point—well, get out of the way!”

Yeah. Chaz likes to argue a point, all right.

“So, Lizzie,” Roberta says pleasantly. “When can you start?”

I gape at her. “You mean I got the job?”

“Of course.” Roberta looks at me strangely, as if any other turn of events would be unthinkable. “Could you start tomorrow?”

Can I start tomorrow? Is there a grand total of three hundred and twenty-one dollars in my checking account? Are my credit cards maxed out to their limits? Am I fifteen hundred dollars in debt to MasterCard?

“I can definitely start tomorrow!”

Oh, Chaz, I take it all back. I love you. You can say whatever you want about Luke. You can be as pessimistic as you choose about the wisdom of my wanting to marry him. For this, Chaz, I owe you. Big time.

“I love your boyfriend.” I call Shari on my cell to tell her as I come out of the skyscraper on Madison Avenue in which the offices of Pendergast, Loughlin, and Flynn take up the entire thirty-seventh floor.