realized I didn’t even feel enough for him to shed a tear about it. Am I an awful person?”
I lay down beside her, twisting the base of the bottle in the sand so it wouldn’t spill. I turned my head toward her. “Amelia, you are a lot of things. Awful will never be one of them.”
She met my eyes and smiled, making my stomach do that thing again that I could no longer pretend was from the champagne. Was she sending me a signal here?
She pointed up to the sky and said, “Is that the Southern Cross?”
I laughed.
“What?”
“Amelia, you can’t see the Southern Cross from here. You have to be in the Southern Hemisphere. Occasionally you can catch it in Key West or maybe Texas, but never here.”
She laughed, too. “But doesn’t that look like a cross?”
I was pretty sure she had had too much champagne. “I’ve seen it,” I said. “On my semester at sea.”
“I’d like to see it,” she said.
“I’d like to show you,” I responded, feeling brave.
She turned toward me then, and the way she smiled, I knew what she said next was going to change my life. And it did. But not in the way I wanted. “Park, I have missed you. I don’t think I realized it, but I have.”
I couldn’t breathe. My heart was beating out of my chest. Is this actually happening?
“You are the little brother I never had.” She turned back toward the sky and said, “Is that the Big Dipper?” Then laughed. “Am I the worst amateur astronomer you’ve ever known?”
I tried to laugh, but the little brother I never had kept floating around in my head.
A decade later, as the Uber pulled into the driveway of my Palm Beach house, I realized that I had read that moment on that beach all wrong. So maybe tonight had just been in my head, too, something I had wanted to happen for so long that I believed things that weren’t reality.
“Thanks, man,” I said to the Uber driver, taking a moment to rate and tip him before I got inside and got distracted.
As I stepped in the back door, into the dark, quiet house, the smile left once and for all. Greer. What had I been thinking? I was Greer’s. Always and forever. Nothing could change that. No moment, no dance, no fun day.
No one would ever convince me to move on from what I had lost.
Not even Amelia Saxton.
Amelia
A GREATER-GOOD ENDEAVOR
I FOUND OUT I WOULD never be a mother on March 17, 1996. Back then, I got upset about girls being mean at school or making a bad grade on a test or generally feeling flustered and afraid about life. I was a teenage girl, ready to cry on my mother’s shoulder. But that’s the day everything changed. Because the minute I heard the news, I knew somehow that it was going to be more difficult for her than it was for me. In the most ironic way, the day I found out I couldn’t perform a core womanly biological function, I became a woman. I had to protect my mother. I would never cry on her shoulder again.
That moment split things open inside of me I didn’t know I had. It was a single lightning strike that sank an entire ship. Minutes earlier, I’d assumed I would grow up, fall in love, get married, have children.
From the time I was born, practically, I had dragged a baby doll around, and, as I got older, arranged my life around its fictional feeding times and diaper changes. I remember the doctor saying, “But with the advances in technology, you are perfectly capable of carrying a baby, Amelia. You’d just have to use someone else’s egg.”
I was fourteen years old, barely capable of understanding the reproductive process, and ignorant about anything related to sex. I had been horrified to even tell my mother that my period, which had arrived two years earlier, had suddenly stopped. And I was sitting in a paper gown in this cold exam room being talked to about things that I was entirely too young to process. Primary ovarian insufficiency. The word “insufficiency” bounced around in my head.
My mother could process these things that I couldn’t. And that, I think, was why I had to be strong for her. Because my mother had had real babies. She had given birth to Robby and me. Carried us. Raised us.
Studying me on the examining table from where she sat on the