“Sorry, my mind wandered off. What?”
“You want some appetizers or no?”
“Sure, I’ll eat whatever you guys order.”
Evan nodded and said something to the waitress, whom Paige hadn’t even seen standing there. Paige sighed.
“Only a few dates,” said Lauren. “You and Josh, I mean. I can’t believe I didn’t know about it.”
“I’m serious. If you say the word, it’s over.”
“And I said it’s fine. Weird, but… I’ll adjust, I guess. If you think it’s really going somewhere.”
“You don’t like it.”
Lauren shrugged. “It’s not that, exactly. I’m trying to picture it.”
Paige wasn’t eager to mount a defense of her relationship with Josh. “We have fun. I don’t know what you want me to say. You must agree he’s a good guy.”
“I do, but he’s never dated one of my friends before.”
“Right.”
“Josh is great, and I love him, obviously. But hejustgot out of a relationship that really messed him up, and on top of that, his firm works him pretty hard. I’ve hardly seen him at all since he moved here, and aside from you apparently, I’m the only person he knows in the city who doesn’t also work for DCL. I guess I’m worried. For both of you.”
“So you don’t want me to date him?”
Lauren frowned. “I need some time to get used to the idea.”
Caleb walked into the bar then, which at least distracted Lauren for a few minutes. Lindsay changed the subject to the restaurant she’d reviewed a few nights before, but Paige felt her heart sink.
Chapter 17
It had been a few days since Lauren had found out about Paige and Josh. It didn’t feel like anything had changed much. Lauren had been cold and aloof at work. Paige had asked her if things were okay between them a few times, and Lauren always said they were, but it didn’t feel that way.
Josh was Lauren’s family. He was forever. If this tension couldn’t be resolved in some way, then Paige would be the one pushed out. She could already feel her friendship with Lauren unraveling, which was frustrating because she couldn’t work out why. Lauren didn’t like that Paige and Josh were dating, but they weren’t doing anything to hurt Lauren. But Lauren was treating it that way.
Lauren wasn’t even there on Wednesday afternoon when Paige and Pablo ran the literacy program. They had a very enthusiastic group of six- and seven-year-olds who were very cute and surprisingly patient.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” said the teacher, a woman named Annette. They were helping kids pick books. “A lot of my students have working parents and have been in day care since they were two. They’ve had routines drilled into them since they were toddlers. They know what to do. I mean, every now and then you get an excitable kid or one whose parents did preschool at home. Take Owen, for example.” Annette gestured at a dark-haired boy who was chasing one of the cats across the room. “But these are well-behaved kids, for the most part.”
Paige found that a little cynical, but she nodded to make the teacher go away.
Between donations and the books Paige had bought with fundraising money, they had enough books on-hand for each kid to take three with some left over, so the kids had plenty to do. In most cases, once each kid picked a comfortable spot, at least one of the cats came over to sniff him or her and see what the kid was about. A few kids got two cats to sit near them, or sat together and had a rapt audience of cats.
A little boy had snuggled up to Mr. Darcy and readThe Cat in the Hatto him, and it was so cute that Paige worried her heart might burst.
By the end of the hour, some of the kids were ready to beg their moms to get them a cat. Paige told them they could come back to the café to visit the cats at any time. Annette and the other teacher who had come were impressed that the kids had been so excited to read to the cats. The articles Paige had read were right; the kids seemed less inhibited when they didn’t think adults were listening.
As the kids filed out, Pablo agreed that it was a great success and they should do it again.
Sometimes it hit her how odd it was that she’d gone from arranging annual meetings for a big corporate bank to, well, this. She had no regrets, though. She loved this work and coming to the café was fun. She felt good about helping the cats. Paige had done so much outreach to shelters, volunteer organizations, and pet websites in Brooklyn, the Cat Café felt like a community space, and Paige was an integral part of that community.
Which was why she couldn’t lose this. It washers.
So Paige felt good about that.Thisshe could do. Romance, though?
She’d tried in vain to catch Josh on the phone all week, hoping for some kind of reassurance, and kept getting his voicemail message. He’d texted to apologize, but he was busy with his boss and the court case, which was apparently going as poorly as predicted. She wasn’t sure why that thought had popped into her head as she and Pablo picked up the books from where the kids had left them.
