Page 54

Rilee

San Diego

The apartment’s tiny. Old. The kind of place that creaks when I walk and still smells faintly like the last tenant’s coconut shampoo—but it’s clean.

The windows open easily. There’s light. And my new roommate, Jules, is friendly in that chaotic, caffeine-fueled way only another first-year nurse can be.

Still, it doesn’t feel like home.

Not yet.

Maybe it’s the palm trees. Or the smell of the ocean I can’t quite get used to. Maybe it’s the way everything here feels wide open—sunny and bright and just a little too cheerful for someone still carrying six states’ worth of ache in her chest.

I go through the motions.

Morning shift at the birthing center. I scan patient charts. Assist with a complicated delivery. Help a first-time geriatric mother. Draw blood without flinching. Give comfort without crying.

They say I’m doing great.

But I don’t feel great.

I feel… splintered.

Like I left a piece of myself in Michigan, tangled in blankets and warm hands and too many half-whispered promises.

Caleb texts sometimes. First, it was just to see where I was and if I could get almond milk on my way home. That one hurt. I couldn’t leave him on read, like I told myself would be for the best.

I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. I couldn’t.

Fuck, Ri. No.

He called me nine times. I let them all go to voicemail. Then I’d cried all the tears. We still text, but now it’s mostly just light stuff. Memes. A photo of Hunter in a hoodie, scowling at something off-screen. Grayson flipping off the camera.

He didn’t beg me to come back.

I’m grateful—and heartbroken—for that.

Some days, I tell myself I made the right call. That this was always the plan. That chasing your future sometimes means letting go of your present.

Other days, I see a guy at the hospital with dark hair and broad shoulders and have to blink away the image of Hunter brushing my hair back. Or hear a laugh that sounds just like Grayson’s. Or bite into a sour gummy and feel Caleb’s smile bloom in my chest like it never left.

It’s warm here. Breezy. Easy in a way that makes it hard to breathe.

But at night, when the streets quiet and Jules is snoring with a podcast still playing, I lie on my narrow twin bed and press my phone to my chest like maybe it still remembers their voices.

I’m doing everything I ever dreamed.

I just didn’t know it would feel so lonely.