Brooklyn appears as both a practical point of arrival and a setting for a more self-directed life. Landon has a fifth-grade teaching job lined up at a public school there, while Tessa and Hardin later share a modest apartment in the borough that Tessa can help pay for. In these glimpses, Brooklyn is tied less to spectacle than to work, affordability, and the everyday terms on which the couple tries to build a life together.

Setting and Early Connections

At the time Tessa reflects on her uncertain career direction, Landon’s next step is already concrete: he is set to teach fifth grade at a Brooklyn public school. Tessa, by contrast, is still deciding what she wants after college, and no longer feels compelled to follow the field she once chose. Brooklyn thus enters the story through Landon’s work and the contrast between his settled plan and Tessa’s willingness to take time over her own choices.

Shared Domestic Life

After Hardin moves to New York City, he and Tessa make a home together in a decent Brooklyn apartment. Although Hardin is earning well, he is willing to choose a place Tessa can help afford; she resists having him pay all her bills while she works out her direction. Their arrangement gives material form to her insistence on contributing rather than being financially carried. During this period she works at a restaurant between wedding-planning work and classes, while Hardin complains only minimally about the demanding schedule.

Work and Independence

The Brooklyn home belongs to a broader period in which Tessa is building a working life on her own terms. She is no longer rushing herself toward a decision simply because she once believed her college major had fixed her future. Later, as her wedding-planning business grows and she establishes her name in New York City’s competitive wedding scene, the earlier combination of paid work, classes, and planning marks a stage in that development. The evidence places Brooklyn most clearly as the setting of the couple’s shared apartment and Landon’s planned teaching job; it does not specify the borough as the location of Tessa’s later business success.