I visited twice.
Each time, the house felt full of Molly-shaped spaces.
Her mug in the cabinet.
Her coat still hanging behind the kitchen door.
A photograph of the two of us at fifteen and eighteen, wearing matching bridesmaid dresses and expressions of mutual betrayal.
At my apartment, she existed mostly inside my phone.
The last message.
Tomorrow, then.
I could not stay in Chicago.
I also could not go home.
So when a recruiter sent me a listing for a marketing director at a boutique resort in the Florida Keys, I applied mostly because the photograph showed a palm tree and no conference rooms.
They hired me after two video calls.
The salary was terrible.
The title was impressive.
The resort claimed to value work-life balance, which I would later learn meant employees were expected to answer emails from the beach.
I sold half my furniture, packed the rest into a storage unit, and drove south in a car that developed a mysterious clicking sound somewhere in Georgia.
My mother cried when I left.
My father checked the tires three times.
“You don’t have to run,” Mom said.
“I’m not running.”
“You’re moving fourteen hundred miles.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“It requires paperwork.”
She did not laugh.
Molly would have.
Pelican Key was smaller than it had looked online.
The resort was smaller too.
The “executive office” was a converted storage room beside the laundry facilities, and my apartment contained mold shaped vaguely like South America.
I stayed.
