I love you so much that I want you to be happy might sound like a martyr’s plea. But it honestly isn’t. It’s selfish, in fact. I can’t leave this earth content knowing that you might never experience all the good things life has to offer. We aren’t meant to be alone, my love. I know that now. So when you find that woman, the special one, the right one, the one that is worthy of all that you are, don’t be afraid to tell her how you feel. You won’t be sullying my memory. You will only be making a new one.
Parker, you have been the kindest, most heroic man I could ever have hoped to meet. The way that you have taken care of me and loved me and never skipped a beat through the worst ordeal imaginable is the stuff of fairy tales. You are my knight in shining armor. You are the love of my life. I know that, for a time, I was yours, too.
Our story didn’t end as planned, and I regret that wholeheartedly. But please, Parker, please: don’t let the idea that our story ended badly keep you from writing a new one.
With all my love and all my heart, forever, until the end of time,
Greer
Amelia
A SHORT ROPE
WHEN GREER CAME TO MY apartment in Palm Beach that day, almost five years ago, face ashen, my first instinct was to worry about the mess in my living room. Piles of magazines on the coffee table, bills strewn about, a bed pillow on the couch, the couch pillows on the floor, two Diet Dr Pepper cans, half-drunk, on the end table.
“I’m sorry,” I said as she walked in, my mind rushing with excuses, beyond that I had been really lazy the past couple of days.
But as she sat down on top of a copy of the Wall Street Journal, I realized that Greer wasn’t worried about what my apartment looked like. She was… somewhere else. I’m pretty sure I went white, too, then.
“Greer,” I said softly, sitting down beside her. “It’s too late. It has gone to press. There’s no way I can get the story back now.”
But then she looked up at me, eyes big and round and tear-filled. “It isn’t about the story,” she whispered. She looked down at her hands. “I can’t do it,” she said.
My heart started to race, but I wasn’t sure why. “Do what?”
“I have to ask you for a favor.”
Why was she whispering? We were all alone. My eyes locked on hers.
Getting that story back from the printer, making 350,000 copies of one of the country’s premier magazines disappear, felt simpler than what she said next.
Now, years later, I lay awake all night at Dogwood in my childhood twin bed with its monogrammed duvet cover and tiny canopy, thinking about Greer, about the bond we shared after that night. Was that bond holding me back from Parker? Did it feel like a betrayal to Greer? Or was her coming to me that night somehow a way of giving me permission?
For me, one worry always begets another. That night with Greer had come back to me after I realized that this could be one of the last times I ever slept in my bed, in my house, in the place that signified security and happiness and everything simple and good in life.
In my drunken state postdinner, I had come home to find my mother dozing in the chaise lounge beside my bed. In the dim, uneven lamplight, she told me the news about Dogwood, that it would be sold. She felt confident she could squeeze out a little more time. But it was going to be sold.
The blanket of the alcohol made the news seem manageable, palatable even. It was sensible. It was right. I found myself consoling my mother, regaling her with details of our new traditions of Christmas in Paris and Easter at the Breakers. I think I made her feel better. I also think I was overestimating how far the amount of money they would get for the property would stretch, but it soothed both of us in the moment.
But as the hours passed and the news set in (and the alcohol wore off), a deep, longing sadness took over. I couldn’t count the number of nights, cold and ornery, I had cursed this house, prayed that God would bring a couple to the door to buy it, so we could move somewhere smaller, where every room could be warm and cozy.
The farm had prospered. Things had gotten better. It just wasn’t enough to maintain this beast of a house that, even in my lovelorn state, I knew was running my family dry. Even though it was terribly unfair, I hated my mother in that moment. Why hadn’t she sold Dogwood way back when it was just a family home, not a symbol of all that had been good in my life?
The sun rose on that sleepless night, lifting some of the stress the blanket of darkness had intensified. Harris was inside drinking coffee with my mother, reassuring himself that she loved him best, that he was first and foremost in her heart despite the fishing fiasco, which left me to load our luggage into the car—and contemplate whether he was first and foremost in my heart. And, if so, did I tell him about the kiss?
As I was throwing a bag into the trunk, I smelled cigarette smoke behind me, and when I turned, Mason was walking toward me in a rumpled polo shirt and a pair of Patagonia shorts that I think used to be navy and were now a faded cobalt.
“My bags are packed, I’m ready to go,” he sang.
I smiled at him, squinting into the morning sun behind his head.
“Isn’t this kind of early for you to be up?”
He laughed. “Oh, Amelia. Always with the jokes.”
I used to say that Mason and I were technically still together. We’d never actually broken up, after all. We had been dating, if you could even call it that. It was more like, we’d hung out mostly with other friends and by ourselves a few times.
When he had his accident, though, it was like he just disappeared. No call. No letter. No explanation. Romantic comedy over. I spent more time than I’d like to admit wondering what could have been between us. What if he’d accepted that his baseball dream was over, gone to college, gotten a job? For months, I expected him to just show back up in Cape Carolina, kiss me passionately, thank me for waiting for him. But that was all very, very long ago.
“What’s up with you and my brother?”
“You jealous?” I retorted, winking at him.
“Hell yeah, I am.”
“I’m a little old for you,” I said as he lifted the other suitcase into the back of the car. The entire town marveled at Mason’s ability to continuously date twenty-year-olds, but I didn’t think it was a mystery. They were the only ones who didn’t know better.
“You gonna just keep pretending that you don’t know my brother’s in love with you?”
I smirked at him and leaned against the car, crossing my arms. He took a final drag of his cigarette and stomped it out.
“Parker’s heart will always belong to Greer.” I shrugged. “I’m not trying to spend my life in the shadow of a dead woman. There are plenty of living women whose shadows I can be in.”
Mason scoffed and squinted at me. “Parker has always had the hots for you.”
I eyed him curiously.
He eyed me back and sort of half chuckled. “Oh my God. You don’t know.”
“Know what?” I wasn’t just playing coy. I really didn’t know. And I was morbidly interested to find out.
“The fight.”
Those two words took me back to the smoky Tackle Box. We were all underage, but no one cared. Mason was royalty. I was the royal girlfriend—or well, the royal girl of the week, at least. Parker was the royal brother. All the other people in town were subjects. I remember thinking that Parker, Watson, and Spence were a little too fired up that night, a little too rowdy, more than a little too drunk. But Mason had just pitched his last game at Cape Carolina High, a complete shutout. I had been the girl who had run out on the field to congratulate him, the one he looked for, the one whose lips he kissed for the whole town to see. I was the one whose ear he’d whispered into, as we walked off the field, “This is how it’s always going to be, babe. Big wins. You and me.” The glare of stardom will blind a girl, especially a seventeen-year-old one.