peaches | fillie

epilogue

seven years later

Millie stepped out of the train car, cello rolling behind her.

She took a deep breath of city air and then continued out of the station and down the busy sidewalk.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it Sads," She whined into the phone held up to her ear, "I won't forget about you, even though you're literally coming down next weekend to help me set up my interview with Dacia Clay."

"Just making sure, Millie. Oh, did you get the muffin basket from the gang yet? We sent it like two days ago so..." The redhead rambled on the other line.

"Yeah! It was waiting very patiently on my doorstep when I got home on Tuesday. Speaking of the mail, I have to pass by the mailman whenever I leave in the morning and that woman is fucking crazy. Like, rude as hell and watches my every move! I feel like I don't collect my mail correctly whenever she's there,"

Sadie sighed. "That's why you should've stayed in North Carolina rather than going to lame old Philadelphia. There are no psycho mail ladies! And all of your friends are here,"

Millie could almost see her smirk through the phone. "Well, I'll call you later, Sadie. I'll tell you how my shoot for Strings goes tomorrow," she smiled to herself and made a kissing noise into the cellphone "Love you too, g'bye."

The girl sighed contently as she slid her phone into her coat pocket and adjusted her scarf closer to her mouth. The east coast winter was bitter and unforgiving, something that she had always been accustomed to until now, where she suddenly felt like she had never experienced it before. Her heels made a faint clicking sound on the sidewalk as she rounded the corner near her apartment and she dodged a woman (that was presumably drunk) trying to sell her bagged sandwiches.

It took a long time for her to adjust to living somewhere so urban, but once she understood the rules of the road, everything else fell into place. She knew where the best underground pizza shops were and how to get from Barnes & Noble to that one cute coffee shop off of Montrose and then to her job at Eastman in less than twenty minutes (minus however long it took her inside of the stores). Millie developed a good system and stuck to it nearly every day that she could unless she had extra time to stop at Le Pain Quotidien and Anthropologie before heading home to teach whichever student fell on a Wednesday that week.

She hadn't had much time to cultivate a long list of friends, however, so her calls with Sadie every other day gave her a sense of order and peace that she couldn't quite find anywhere else. They weren't typically long conversations but they were enough to unload all of the rants she had about coworkers and ignorant students in the school. Lately, there wasn't as much to tell because the workspace had become more bearable the longer she taught there, but it was still nice to actually speak to someone who she had known for longer than a couple months.

Millie unlocked her front door quickly and hoisted her cello up the stairs in front of her small townhome. The rent was expensive even though it was a fairly small place and she took pride in the fact that she could muster up the money to pay for it every month with her teaching job. Private lessons added an extra hundred dollars to her salary nearly twelve times each week, which helped, but it was still a grand feat to be able to be financially comfortable in a city with such little experience living in one.

One of the only things that Sadie ever really encouraged Millie to do during their calls was to get out more. She rolled her eyes everytime the other mentioned it, obviously, but for once Millie was actually going to try and go for it. She had decided on making plans with one of her colleagues and only friends that she had made in the bustling city.