I flopped back dramatically onto the pillows and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t look him in the eye when I knew I was about to sound so childish. “That’s the thing, Park. How can I compete with your perfect, untainted memory of your one true love? How could anyone compete with that?”

Parker lay down next to me and pulled my arm so that I rolled over and was face-to-face with him. “It’s really hard,” he whispered, “because she’s gone. She isn’t here to defend herself. And it feels wrong on every level to say something negative about someone who died so tragically.” He bit his lip. “I loved her, Lia, don’t get me wrong. And I don’t fault her for it, but Greer was…” He paused as if afraid to say the word. “Well, she was selfish. I knew it about her, and that was fine. I loved her, and I was fine to move to her town and work for her company and live in her house. But she was the kind of woman who just chose where you went out to dinner and where you went on vacation and what you did with your future. She couldn’t help herself.” He stopped talking, and I could tell how hard this was for him. “ ‘Selfish’ isn’t even the right word, because she was so dedicated to helping people who needed it… but it was like, sometimes, with us, with the people who loved her most, she sort of forgot that we had needs, too.” He paused. “Please don’t think I’m a bad person.”

I kissed him and said, “Parker, I could never ever think that.”

“But when you offered to have a baby for me…” He trailed off, tears in his eyes. “Amelia, that was the most selfless thing I have ever seen one person do for another. You just wanted me to be happy. And I want the person I’m with to be happy, but it has occurred to me lately that maybe I deserve a partner who thinks about my happiness, too.”

I nodded as best I could with my head practically stuck to the pillow.

He squeezed my knee, then got up and headed to the bathroom. He turned back to me. “And I won’t tell you I love you again. That was a little much.”

I wanted to tell him I loved him, too, but instead, I said, “Do you still want them, Parker? The babies?”

“No,” he said quickly, too quickly.

I looked out my window, at the skyscraper across the way. That was the thing about New York. All these windows. All these people. Together, they seemed vast, infinite, maybe even unimportant. But inside each of those windows are families and lovers and friends and maybe even enemies, people falling together and falling apart. And, tonight, Parker and I, we were doing one of those things. I just wasn’t sure which one yet.