“Right, of course,” he said, but he smiled.
Lauren couldn’t help but wonder what he must have been like before the divorce. Had he been happier? Less grouchy? Had he been idealistic, hopeful, nice?
Would she have liked him then?
Probably. A man as sexy as Caleb with a pleasant disposition to match? That sounded like Lauren’s dream man. Of course, he’d been married back then.
And, well, despite his grouchiness, Lauren kinda liked the man he was now. She smiled at him, probably looking silly, but Caleb reached up a hand and ran it through her hair, meeting her gaze and continuing to smile.
If her friends could see the way she and Caleb were grinning at each other now, they wouldn’t believe it. And that was fine; she didn’t need to tell them yet.
***
Hank nearly pulled Caleb’s arm out of the socket as he pulled him down the street. Caleb had decided to go for a long walk to clear his head. In the short time he’d lived in this neighborhood, he hadn’t explored it much, and having Hank lead him around was a decent excuse.
Hank was a huge dog. He was dumb and friendly but still kind of a beast. Labs were sometimes susceptible to obesity, but that wasn’t really the case here. Hank wasn’t fat, just large for a dog, close to a hundred pounds. So he could put some good force on the leash. Caleb worried he’d have little choice in where they went today.
But when they got up to Montague Street in the heart of Brooklyn Heights, Hank seemed more interested in sniffing everything. Montague was bustling at this time of day, people popping in and out of the various businesses and restaurants. It was charming, in a way, the nineteenth-century brownstones juxtaposed with the brightly lit signs of the modern stores that lined the street. The short, narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights almost reminded Caleb of a much smaller town, like a little village tucked into the wider city.
Caleb’s attitude toward New York City since he’d moved here had been “Why not?” It hadn’t been his first choice; he’d mostly just tagged along with Kara. He was still getting his bearings, not used to the tempo or size of the city. Boston had been just as expensive but felt more compact. Here, it could take an hour or more to get to some parts of the city, the subway ran all night, and he could get nearly anything his heart desired delivered almost instantly. He’d picked Brooklyn Heights on the recommendation of a vet school buddy, and it was a very nice neighborhood, but he didn’t know much about it besides that it was expensive and looked to be full of Old Money.
He let Hank lead him toward the end of Montague Street, which Caleb knew must have terminated near the river. He’d been in the neighborhood for such a short amount of time, though, that the sign pointing toward the promenade surprised him. He had a vague understanding of the neighborhood’s geography from looking at maps, but he hadn’t ever walked to this section of it.
This end of Montague was gorgeous. Old brownstones were largely left unchanged by a century of progress. Caleb could easily picture what this neighborhood must have looked like at the end of the nineteenth century, with women bustling about on their errands wearing voluminous skirts instead of jeans, with men in hats and suits instead of T-shirts. This pocket of Brooklyn was out of time, perhaps. And just ahead, Caleb could see a slice of the East River.
“Want to check it out, Hank?”
Hank barked and happily let his tongue loll out of his mouth.
Caleb laughed and said, “All right. Come on, buddy.”
There was a short walkway, and then, suddenly, the scenery stole Caleb’s breath.
The promenade was a long esplanade that overlooked the East River and lower Manhattan. Caleb brought Hank up to the railing and found himself gazing at the skyscrapers of the financial district, One World Trade Center surrounded by dozens of tall buildings Caleb didn’t know the names of. The Brooklyn Bridge spanned the river just ahead, and it was a remarkable sight, that old bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan just as it had for nearly 140 years. To the left, a fair distance away, was the Statue of Liberty, holding her torch up in welcome.
This was the city in all its glory. Caleb had never seen it from an angle like this before. He’d flown into New York a couple of times since moving here, and he always spent the descent gazing out the window and trying to identify the landmarks. There was a lot about this city he still didn’t know yet or hadn’t explored. He’d done a lot of the obvious tourist stuff with Kara when they’d first moved here, but since she’d left, he’d mostly kept to himself, just traveling between his home and his work.
Caleb walked with Hank up the promenade a little. Attached to the railing was a framed photograph of this same view, but before 2001, the Twin Towers still standing. The picture was jarring, upsetting in its way. Caleb didn’t have roots here, had never even been to New York until a few years ago, but he’d met enough New Yorkers through his job to know people did have deep histories and memories. Brooklyn in particular was an odd mix of people who had lived here for years, whose families had been here for generations, and people who had moved here five minutes ago because it was trendy or it was what they could afford. Lauren had told him that she’d originally moved to Brooklyn because she couldn’t afford Manhattan, but parts of Brooklyn were even more expensive than Manhattan now.
Caleb brought Hank over to a bench and they sat so Caleb could people watch for a few minutes. There were joggers, probably passing by for the view. There were people out casually walking. A few office workers eating lunch. A woman he recognized as a barista from the coffee shop near his apartment leaned on the railing and looked at Manhattan.
Caleb couldn’t complain much about gentrification since it got him a nice apartment in an affluent neighborhood, but he’d been reading a lot about how Brooklyn was changing. Whitman Street ran through a part of Brooklyn that was quite gentrified, cute little mom-and-pop shops lining the long boulevard that ran from the East River all the way to Queens. The street changed after it intersected with Flatbush Avenue; the eastern part of it was old warehouses and self-storage places and train yards and housing projects. Of course, in order for this whole swath of Brooklyn to be cute and charming, a lot of people had either been priced out or pushed out of their homes.
He sighed. The promenade overlooked the highway, which added some noise to this otherwise peaceful place, and what Caleb thought must have been Brooklyn Bridge Park nearby. He didn’t much mind the noise; he was willing to overlook that for this view.
So maybe this neighborhood did have some magic to it.
Caleb had thought he’d take a job at a clinic and work there until he figured out what to do next, and part of his plan had been to probably start his own practice, likely in a less expensive city. But working for someone else had its perks. Being able to focus on his patients without fretting about finances was the major advantage. Being part of an established practice and not having to worry about finding new patients was another. He still felt a bit like an outsider in this community, but the longer he worked at the clinic, the more they tried to include him. There was a routine, a rhythm, and he enjoyed having that in his life.
And then there was Lauren. It… It wasn’t a real thing and probably never would be, but having her in his life challenged him in a way, and being with her at night reminded him that he was still capable of feeling. What would he do when they inevitably ended whatever was happening between them? How would he feel when she began dating someone else?
Best not to think of that right now.
Caleb leaned back on the bench and let the sun bathe him. He felt more like his old self than he had in a while, content instead of tense and angry. Was that this place? Was it because Kara was gone, because he was here, because the pieces of his life were falling into place? He didn’t know and he didn’t want to question it too much.
He looked down at Hank, who was lying on the paving stones, his tongue out, his eyes taking it all in. He looked happy, too. “What do you think, Hank? Should we stay awhile?”
Hank barked, probably at a bird that had landed on the railing, but Caleb took that as a yes.
