Chapter 6
DESTINY
One Year Later…
I wore my mother’s diamond earrings and turquoise ring every day.
Every single day.
Not because anyone made me. Not because Edge watched for them, or Tarak needed proof I understood what those gifts meant. Not because Regan got soft around the eyes the first few times she saw the diamonds catching California sunlight.
I wore them because they became part of me.
Like my phone.
Like my car keys.
Like the little tube of lip balm I lost in every purse I owned and somehow always found again when I had already bought another one.
The earrings went in before class. The ring slid onto my finger before I left my room.
If I forgot either one, I felt wrong all day, like I had walked out missing a piece of myself.
The diamonds were small enough not to scream money, but real enough to throw sharp little sparks when I turned my head.
The turquoise ring was older, heavier, full of desert color and history.
It looked out of place against my California life sometimes.
That was why I loved it.
It reminded me that starting over did not mean erasing everything.
We went straight from Cabo to California.
No dramatic return to Santa Fe. No long goodbye at the ranch.
No walking back into the place where everyone knew too much and still somehow understood too little.
Regan called it a clean transition. Edge called it necessary.
Tarak called it smart. I called it being dropped into a life I had dreamed about before I knew dreams could come with paperwork, security deposits, student IDs, and a meal plan that charged fourteen dollars for a salad.
Pepperdine sat above the ocean like someone had built a campus out of sunlight, money, and impossible views.
At first, I hated how beautiful it was.
Beauty made me suspicious.
The ocean was too blue. The grass too green.
The students too polished. Everyone seemed to own matching luggage and emotional stability.
Girls wore oversized sweatshirts with perfect messy buns and carried iced drinks like accessories.
Boys looked like they had been grown in labs specializing in khaki shorts, clean sneakers, and family trust funds.
I started in a dorm because Regan insisted I needed the college experience.
Edge insisted the dorm had terrible security.
Tarak said he could fix that by scaring the entire residential life department into better locks.
Somehow, between Regan’s charm, Edge’s silent menace, Tarak’s ability to make administrators rethink their life choices, and JD’s talent for making phone calls that changed reality, I ended up in a room with an ocean view, a reinforced lock, and a roommate assignment that changed my life in a way no one had planned.
Lily McCallister from rural Idaho arrived with three suitcases, a rolling laundry hamper, thick glasses, and the wide-eyed terror of a girl who had never seen the Pacific Ocean in person.
She also had a reusable tote bag full of homemade potato rolls because apparently her grandmother had panicked at the idea of her going to California hungry.
“The most exciting thing that happens in my town,” Lily told me within the first hour, “is the annual fair, the tractor pull, and the best potato bake contest. One year, Mrs. Henderson used smoked gouda and the church ladies still talk about it like she committed arson.”
I stared at her.
Then I laughed.
Not politely.
Actually laughed.
Lily blinked behind her thick glasses, then smiled like she had just won something.
That was when Regan walked in carrying a box of towels.
Lily saw her and froze.
Her eyes went huge behind her lenses.
“Oh my gosh,” Lily whispered. “Are you famous?”
Regan stopped. “Excuse me?”
“You look like someone from a soap opera,” Lily said, completely serious. “Or one of those movies where everyone is rich and someone gets pushed down stairs.”
I choked.
Regan’s mouth twitched. “That is oddly specific.”
“I watched a lot of daytime television with my grandma,” Lily said. “You have cheekbones for betrayal.”
I lost it.
I laughed so hard I had to sit on the bed.
Regan put a hand on her hip and looked at me. “I like her.”
Then Edge and Tarak walked in carrying the heavier boxes.
Lily turned.
Her mouth fell open.
Edge wore a black T-shirt, dark jeans, boots, and a face that made strangers reconsider their tone. Tarak was right behind him, arms loaded with my books, expression carved from stone and warning labels.
Lily slowly pushed her glasses higher on her nose.
“Dude,” she whispered to me. “Your parents are famous actors.”
Regan made a sound.
Edge looked at me.
Tarak looked at the ceiling like he was asking for patience from a God he did not fully trust.
Lily nodded like she had uncovered a conspiracy. “Okay. So crime actors.”
“No,” I said. “No actors.”
“Then why do they look like they’re about to star in a prestige cable drama about murder and emotional damage?”
Regan laughed so hard she dropped the towels.
That was how Lily became my best friend.
Not slowly. Not cautiously. Not with the careful distance I had learned to keep between myself and people who might eventually turn on me.
She just happened.
Like weather.
Like fate wearing prescription glasses and carrying emergency snacks.
By October, we were inseparable.
We were both in nursing, though Lily had come into it with a much cleaner reason than I had.
She wanted to work in pediatric care because she had a baby cousin born early who spent months in the NICU.
I wanted nursing because hands knew how to heal even when hearts didn’t.
Because the healer on the res had taught me herbs, poultices, teas, prayers, old remedies, and things science would probably roll its eyes at but still couldn’t fully explain.
Because I had seen too much blood and fear not to want to be useful when someone needed help.
Lily studied like a maniac.
So did I.
That was one of the reasons people liked us and hated us at the same time. We were fun enough to get invited places, serious enough to leave early, and ruthless enough to ruin a curve without apologizing.
I became popular by accident.
That was the strangest thing.
No one here knew the full story. Not really.
There were whispers if people dug deep enough, because the internet never buried anything completely, but JD and the lawyers had done enough damage control that what people found was confusing, incomplete, and surrounded by legal warnings.
Most people just knew I was the girl with the motorcycle family, the good grades, the turquoise ring, and the kind of face that made people assume I was more confident than I felt.
Lily never let anyone talk badly about me.
Not that many people tried.
But when someone did, Lily would blink those giant eyes behind her thick glasses and say something devastating in the softest voice imaginable.
Once, a girl from our anatomy lab made a comment about “scholarship drama girls reinventing themselves by the beach.”
Lily looked up from her notes and said, “That’s brave coming from someone who thought the spleen was part of the digestive tract.”
No one messed with Lily after that.
Or me.
We found a stray cat behind the alley near our favorite coffee place in Santa Monica. She was skinny, gray, suspicious, and missing part of one ear. Lily immediately decided she was ours.
“She looks like a Cupcake,” Lily said.
The cat hissed at us from behind a dumpster.
“That cat has killed before,” I said.
“Cupcake has boundaries.”
“We are not naming a feral alley demon Cupcake.”
We named her Cupcake.
We started feeding her twice a week. Then three times. Then every day we could, which meant we were basically co-parenting a criminal with whiskers. Cupcake only let Lily touch her after six months. She let me touch her after eight. I considered that a greater honor than half my nursing grades.
Lily and I had rituals.
Matcha tea lattes became our new die-for drink, which was ridiculous because I used to think green drinks tasted like lawn clippings and regret.
Now I craved them like oxygen during finals.
We got them before exams. After exams. During emotional breakdowns.
On Sundays when we pretended we were going to meal prep and instead bought pastries.
We went to concerts.
Cheap ones mostly, because even with the trust money I still had an instinctive terror of spending too much.
Lily loved indie bands with names that sounded like medical conditions.
I loved anything loud enough to drown out my thoughts.
We wore boots and eyeliner and came back hoarse, sweaty, and laughing.
We Netflix binged entire seasons when we should have been studying.
We made inside jokes no one else understood.
We had a shared note in our phones called Evidence Against Cupcake.
We kept a running list of professors most likely to survive a zombie apocalypse.
We ranked every coffee shop within driving distance by caffeine strength, bathroom cleanliness, and likelihood of seeing someone cry over organic chemistry.
I had friends before Lily.
I still kept in touch with them—the ones who had been there that bonfire night, the ones who had seen pieces of the fire and survived their own versions of the aftermath.
But we had all split off in separate directions.
Different schools. Different jobs. Different attempts at becoming people who did not flinch every time someone said our names too sharply.
We texted. Sent memes. Checked in on birthdays. Sometimes, late at night, one of us would send a message that said, You awake? and the rest of us knew what that meant.
But Lily was different.
Lily was my every day.
My matcha run.
My study partner.
My person.
I had never had a ride-or-die like her before.