“I was very attracted to her,” he said, and vice versa. That weekend, he invited her to a friend’s barbecue. The next day, they went running in Prospect Park. By Thanksgiving, she found out they were an official couple when they ran into one of Mr. Breland’s co-workers at a movie theater in Queens.
The co-worker introduced Mr. Breland to his wife. “And then Lennie said, ‘This is my girlfriend, Whitney,’” said Ms. Montgomery, who had been hoping he thought of her that way. Later, she asked if he meant it. He did. “By then we were spending so much time together, I just figured,” he said.
In 2018, Mr. Breland moved from Flatbush, Brooklyn into Ms. Montgomery’s apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. Around the same time, Ms. Montgomery entered the “E zone.”
“I was going around telling everybody, ‘OK, I made it to the E zone, which is like the end zone in football when you’re 10 yards from the goal line,” she said. Instead of a touchdown, though, she wanted an engagement ring.
On July 16, 2019, on a vacation to Las Vegas, she got one. Close to midnight, Mr. Breland dropped to one knee by a courtyard fountain outside the Caesar’s Palace hotel and proposed. Ms. Montgomery was too excited to cry. So he, uncharacteristically, shed tears for her.
In the summer of 2020, they canceled their planned January 2021 wedding because of Covid. Ms. Montgomery, who is eager to start a family, was devastated. “Last year was so hard,” she said.
