Chapter 14
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, or deciding 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.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Our friendship has transcended sense.”
They laughed, then cried harder, and Cupcake—Lily’s feral little queen of judgment—sat on an open suitcase and glared at all of us like the move was a personal offense against feline stability.
When I carried boxes down to the truck, Cupcake hissed at me from Lily’s arms.
Lily watched me like a tiny Idaho parole officer with glasses and said, “If you hurt her, I know where hospitals store scalpels.”
I told her I believed her.
I did.
I moved out of the place I had shared with Georgia before Destiny came.
Not because Destiny asked.
She didn’t.
That was why I did it.
The apartment still had too much of the life I had almost built with another woman.
Clean white plates Georgia had picked. A blue throw blanket her mother had sent.
A dent in the wall from a shelf I had hung crooked while Georgia laughed at me from the couch.
It wasn’t haunted exactly, but it belonged to a version of me who had tried to make a promise out of cowardice, and I would not ask Destiny to step into that.
Georgia had already taken what was hers.
The rest went into boxes, donations, storage, or trash.
I rented a smaller place closer to job sites and slept on a mattress on the floor for two weeks because Nate said furniture was “emotionally advanced” and I was “still remedial.”
Destiny and I dated like people trying to learn a language we should have known years ago.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Dinner after her shifts when she smelled like antiseptic and coffee.
Morning walks on the beach when I had been up since dawn checking crews and she had not slept at all.
Tacos eaten on the hood of my truck. Her laughing when I bought Lily a cat tree for Cupcake’s visits and Cupcake chose the cardboard box instead, then acted like the box had always been the intended gift.
Me learning not to reach for Destiny every time I wanted to.
Her learning that wanting me did not mean she had to surrender anything.
We kissed. A lot. Sometimes until my hands shook.
Sometimes until she had to press her forehead to my chest and whisper, “Not yet,” like she was reminding both of us.
So I waited.
Not nobly.
Not easily.
I waited like a starving man in front of a locked bakery with the key burning a hole in his pocket.
But I waited.
Because this time, when Destiny let me in, I wanted every part of her to know she had opened the door herself.
The house started as a job.
That was the lie I told myself for about nine minutes.
Small coastal bungalow in a neighborhood where old stucco houses sat between new money renovations and stubborn retirees who refused to sell.
It had bad plumbing, cracked tile, a sagging porch, and a view of the ocean only if you stood on the upstairs landing, leaned left, and believed in miracles.
The previous owner had let the yard go wild.
The kitchen was a crime scene from 1987.
The bathroom tile looked like a seasick flamingo had designed it.
I loved it immediately.
Callum walked through it with me the first time, boots crunching over broken grout, expression unreadable.
“You buying it for the company?” he asked.
“Investment property.”
“Bullshit.”
I looked at a water stain on the ceiling. “Rental maybe.”
“Bigger bullshit.”
Nate, who had invited himself because minding his business caused him physical pain, leaned in from the hallway. “Is this where we all pretend he isn’t building a nest for Nurse Fire Eyes?”
I threw a broken cabinet knob at him.
He ducked, laughing, then regretted it because his shoulder still hated sudden movement.
The truth was, I didn’t know what I was building at first.
A house.
A future.
An apology too big to fit into words.
Maybe all three.
I didn’t tell Destiny.
Not directly.
But I asked her questions.
Too many.
“What do you think about green tile?” I asked one night while she sat cross-legged on my bare living room floor, eating Thai food from a carton.
“For what?”
“Kitchen.”
“Depends on the green.”
I showed her three samples.
She pointed with her chopsticks. “That one. The others look like hospital nausea.”
The next week: “Quartz or butcher block?”
“For you?”
“For a project.”
“Quartz. Easier to clean. But warm it up with wood shelves or it’ll look sterile.”
A few days later: “Native landscaping or low-maintenance turf?”
She gave me a look over her coffee. “If you put fake grass anywhere near the ocean, I’ll leave you.”
“Native it is.”
She told me she liked soft white walls, not cold white.
Arched doorways. Old wood if it could be saved.
Deep kitchen sinks. Bedroom windows that opened.
A little patio with herbs, even though she had killed basil twice in Albuquerque and still blamed the pot.
She liked turquoise tile when it was used carefully.
Hated shiny black counters. Wanted a bathroom that felt like it belonged in a spa but not a hotel.
She thought outdoor showers were romantic in theory and suspicious in practice because “bugs exist, Dylan.”
I wrote all of it down.
Every word.
I rebuilt the house around her without letting myself believe I deserved to give it to her.
By early summer, the bungalow had become my favorite secret and my worst torment.
I spent mornings there before job sites, evenings there after work, weekends there when Destiny was on shift.
I stripped walls, replaced beams, rebuilt the porch, fought with permits, installed windows, sanded floors, and stood in the unfinished kitchen holding tile samples up to the light like a man trying to decode scripture.
The crew knew better than to tease me too openly after Callum caught one prospect calling it “Destiny’s dollhouse” and made him haul debris for six hours.
Nate still teased me.
Of course he did.
“Brother,” he said one afternoon, standing in the doorway while I checked the quartz counters, “you are one throw pillow away from ovulating.”
“Get out.”
“Are you going to show her before or after you start monogramming towels?”
I pointed the tape measure at him. “I will staple you to the subfloor.”
“You flirt weird.”
Maybe I did.
Because every choice in that house was a confession.
The green tile she had chosen without knowing.
The quartz she said would clean easy after long shifts.
The deep sink.
The old floors I saved because she liked things with scars when they were still strong.