DYLAN
By spring,Destiny lived in San Diego.
Not with me.
She made that clear before she packed a single box.
“I’m transferring hospitals,” she told me over the phone, voice tired after a night shift in Albuquerque. “I’m not transferring into your bed, Dylan.”
I was sitting on the edge of the mattress in the apartment I hated, staring at a wall I had never bothered to hang anything on.
“Wasn’t going to ask.”
“Liar.”
“Wasn’t going to ask out loud.”
That got me one soft laugh.
I lived off that laugh for three days.
She took a position at a hospital twenty minutes from the San Diego clubhouse and found a small one-bedroom apartment with bad water pressure, decent light, and a balcony just big enough for a chair, a dying plant, and whatever version of peace she was willing to let herself have. She wanted her own place. Her own lease. Her own keys. Her own quiet. After years of people moving her for safety, hiding her for protection, ordeciding what distance meant for her heart, I understood better than to argue.
Lily did not handle the move with grace.
She handled it with color-coded packing labels, three emotional breakdowns, two emergency coffee runs, and one dramatic declaration that Destiny was “abandoning the marriage” while sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor surrounded by half-filled boxes and old nursing textbooks neither of them had opened in years.
“We have been together since freshman year,” Lily said, folding one of Destiny’s scrub tops with the stiff precision of a woman trying not to cry into clean laundry. “Freshman year, Destiny. I saw you eat vending machine crackers for dinner during finals. I held your hair back during that food poisoning incident we agreed never to discuss. I know your coffee order, your fake smile, and the exact tone you use when you’re about to do something emotionally reckless.”
“I’m moving to San Diego, Lil. I’m not dying.”
“That is exactly what people say before they move to San Diego and become different. What if you start paddleboarding?”
“I’m a nurse. I don’t have time to paddleboard.”
“What if you start saying things like my morning beach run?”
“I would rather pass a kidney stone.”
Lily pressed the scrub top to her chest and burst into tears anyway.
That was the part I almost couldn’t watch.
I had seen club men take bullets with less visible devastation than Lily McCallister watching Destiny pack a box labeled BATHROOM / RANDOM / DO NOT JUDGE. Those two had been together since freshman year. Study partners first, then roommates, then family in the way women built family out of caffeine, secrets, shared shifts, and knowing exactly when to talk and when to sit in silence.
Leaving Albuquerque was not just Destiny moving closer to me.
It was Destiny leaving the everyday version of Lily.
No more collapsing on the same couch after shifts. No more midnight grocery runs. No more Lily appearing in Destiny’s doorway with matcha, gossip, and Cupcake in a carrier because the cat had “expressed a need for social enrichment.” No more wordless mornings where Lily knew whether Destiny needed a pep talk, coffee, or a blanket thrown over her head.
Destiny sat beside Lily on the floor and pulled her close.
Lily came willingly, crying into her shoulder. “I hate him a little.”
“Dylan?”
“No, San Diego. Yes, Dylan. And also you, but only in a devotional way.”
