When the subway finally screeched into the Franklin Street station,
Brooke was nearly sick with anxiety. She checked her
watch for the tenth time in as many minutes and tried to remind
herself that it wasn’t the end of the world; her best friend, Nola, would
forgive her, had to forgive her, even if she was inexcusably late. She
pushed her way through the rush-hour throngs of commuters toward
the door, instinctively holding her breath in the midst of so many
bodies, and allowed herself to be pulled toward the stairwell. On autopilot
now, Brooke and her fellow riders each pulled their cell phones
from their purses and jacket pockets, filed silently into a straight line
and, zombielike, marched like choreographed soldiers up the right
side of the cement stairs while staring blankly at the tiny screens in
their palms.

"Shit!" she heard an overweight woman up ahead call out, and
in a moment she knew why. The rain hit her forcefully and without
warning the instant she emerged from the stairwell. What had been a
chilly but decent enough March evening only twenty minutes earlier
had deteriorated into a freezing, thundering misery, where the winds
whipped the rain down with driving force and made it utterly impossible
to stay dry.

"Dammit!" she added to the cacophony of expletives people were
shouting all around her as they struggled to pull umbrellas from their
briefcases or arrange newspapers over their heads. Since she’d run
home to change after work, Brooke had nothing but a tiny (and admittedly
cute) silver clutch to shield herself from the onslaught. Goodbye,
hair, she thought as she began to sprint the three blocks to the
restaurant. I’ ll miss you, eye makeup. Nice knowing you, gorgeous new
suede boots that ate up half my weekly salary.

Brooke was drenched by the time she reached Sotto, the tiny, unpretentious
neighborhood joint where she and Nola met two or three
times a month. The pasta wasn’t the best in the city-probably not
even the best on the block-and the space wasn’t anything all that
special, but Sotto had other charms, more important ones: reasonably
priced wine by the full carafe, a killer tiramisu, and a downright hot
Italian ...