Living in fifteen hundred square feet with someone bonds you fairly quickly. I loved the smell of her shampoo wafting through the house after she showered, the taste of the decaf coffee she’d added a pinch of cinnamon to, which we’d share on the porch at sunrise, the sound of her humming while she wrote, lost in one of several freelance pieces she had landed. The feelings I was developing toward her should have set off alarm bells. But they didn’t. They felt simple. They felt right.
We read books together and discussed them, a hobby I had never shared with anyone else. Greer loved to read, but we had different tastes. Amelia tore articles out of The New York Times and left them for me and turned down corners of stories in The New Yorker she thought I’d like.
One night, I said, “It seems like you’re really into the New York–based publications these days. Any reason?” I was teasing, but the thought of her in New York made my heart race uneasily.
She smiled noncommittally. “I guess I’m just thinking that I love Palm Beach, but I don’t have my own home and I don’t have a job, and while I’ll miss my friends, they’ve all moved on, too, you know? After being a managing editor at Clematis, I feel like I can certainly get a writing position at a New York publication. I used to be a little scared of New York.” She laughed ironically. “But certain events of the past year have made me braver.”
My mind was racing with ways to keep her in Palm Beach, with me, even as I said, “Lia, I told you already that you can have any job you want at McCann Media.” I paused. “You’re having my baby, for God’s sake. You’re carrying the heir to the McCann Media empire. I’d say it’s the least I can do.”
I knew what she would say before she even said it: “I appreciate that, and I will certainly come to you if I need help, but I feel like I have to do this on my own.”
On my own… on my own… The words rolled around in my head as I paced nervously around the tiny doctor’s office. We were waiting for the results of Amelia’s blood test, and she was lying back on the table, doing some sort of intense deep-breathing exercise. I assumed she was visualizing, but it seemed a little late for that. Finally, I sat down on the swivel stool beside her and took her hand. She looked at me with one eye. “I’m breathing here,” she said.
“Yes. And you’re doing it very, very well.”
She smiled at me.
“I just need you to know,” I said, “that this has been the most amazing thing that anyone has ever done for me. I am so honored.”
I looked into her eyes, and she looked into mine, and if a third person had been in the room, they would have felt it, too—the tension between us, like something seriously romantic might happen at any time. But was it just in my head, like it had been before?
“I think the hard part is getting ready to start,” she said. I could tell she was trying to keep things light, defuse the intensity of the moment. But she couldn’t. “Thank you,” she whispered, biting her lip.
“For what?”
“For this. I’ve spent my whole life feeling so inadequate as a woman. I was scared, and you pushed me, and…” She paused, putting her hand on her stomach. “I know now what it’s like to feel life growing inside of you.”
She was so sincere and so beautiful and uncharacteristically vulnerable. I felt myself leaning in closer to her. As the hair fell over her face, I put my hand to her warm, smooth cheek, pushed her hair back behind her ear. She turned her head toward me, and our faces were mere inches apart.
The door flew open, and the doctor walked in.
Saved by the bell. Or not. It depends on how you think about it. Saved, I decided. I could never do that to Greer.
Dr. Salter sat down on his rolling stool and said, “Kids, I wish I had some better news for you.”
My heart sank, and I prayed, Let the news be that there’s only one baby.
When he said, “We can’t detect a pregnancy,” Amelia, who was now sitting up, said, “That’s impossible. I feel so incredibly pregnant.”
He held up a piece of paper. “It might be bloating from all the produce you’re eating, if your food log is to be believed.”
Suddenly white, Amelia looked at me, and all I wanted to do was console her. I was the one who had lost my babies—or had never had them. But I couldn’t stand the tears rolling down her cheeks.
“It’s my fault,” she whispered.
“No, no,” Dr. Salter said soothingly. “You know we confirmed all that, Amelia. It isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you could have done. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.” He paused. “You can always try again. You have two more healthy embryos.”
In that moment, I realized I would do whatever she wanted to. Even though they were my embryos, and it was my life that would change, I was going to let her decide. All I wanted was to see her smile.
She had been so sure this was going to work out that she had made me sure, too. We had both been wrong. It was over before it started. My children. My link to Greer. And now, as it felt, my link to Amelia, too. It was all crumbling around me as Dr. Salter said, “I’ll give you two a minute.”
A minute. One minute everything was great and the next it was terrible; one minute Greer was breathing and the next she wasn’t; one minute Amelia and I were having babies and the next we weren’t. I hated minutes.
All I knew was that, as bad as this minute was, I didn’t want it to be over. Because I had come to depend on Amelia. I loved waking up to her making eggs in the morning, seeing her curled up with her book and herbal tea at night. When this minute was over, she was going to be gone.
“I can’t,” Amelia said through her tears.
And I realized that, even though I had sworn I would never be with anyone else, even though I felt in my bones that Greer was the only woman for me, Amelia was a part of my heart. She always had been. And when she walked out that door, the part of me that had come back to life with her was going to die all over again.
* * *
My saving grace was that I had driven us. I had a sickening feeling that if I hadn’t, she would have gotten in the car and left, maybe forever. I could imagine how she was feeling. Truly. Because I was feeling it, too. A sense of loss and helplessness and wondering whether you would ever get what you really, really wanted. But what I hadn’t predicted is when she broke the silence in the car by saying, “I failed you, Parker. I am so sorry.”
I slammed on the brakes and pulled the car over like my dad used to do when Mason and I were fighting in the back seat. “Amelia, you could never, ever fail me. How can you even say that?”
She looked incredulous. “Of course I failed you. I had one job. I can’t even do something most women can do by accident.”
I had to wonder then if this had more to do with her inability to have children of her own than with this loss—or at least if her grief was split. I wondered if this loss also emphasized all the other ones this year: Thad, her job. I could feel her world crumbling. I wanted to put it back together for her, but I didn’t know how. And even if I did, would she want that?
She put her head in her hands, crying. “Parker, you were so happy. So, so happy. I hadn’t seen you smile like that since I put the boards on the tree so you could climb it.”