As we reached the sand, he dropped me, and I lay on my back, panting. He was crouched over me, his face near mine, hands on either side of me. And he was saying, “You’re okay, Amelia. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

As my friends ran up beside us, and Parker still looked down at me, I saw him for the first time. I mean, I really saw him. His words, the bulk and shape of his upper body, and the way we were both panting made me envision, just for a second, that this moment was something entirely different, something much less pure.

All at once, he wasn’t just the annoying kid who used to hide out in the branches of the trees in our yard and jump down to scare me, or the one Mom made me drive to school when he was a freshman, who clearly only listened to music that his friends thought was cool. He was a man. Or, at least, he was on the verge of becoming one. He had saved me. He had protected me. We were connected by more than just the gate between our yards and the cigarettes that we’d occasionally shared at high school parties.

I bought Parker and his friends beer all summer. It was a paltry gift in exchange for my life, but it was what I had to give, despite my friends’ insistence that beer was not what Parker wanted from me. I mostly ignored it.

But every time I had seen Parker since, I hugged him a little longer, I mentally thanked him a little more. Because he had truly saved my life. Later, a part of me believed he could save Greer, too, just through sheer force of will. I had hoped he could, had wanted him to. But no such luck.

Fourteen years later, back in Cape Carolina, I looked at him across the marsh, sitting on his dock. Even in the dark, I could see the dimple in his chin that came out when he grinned, the way that, even though he could laugh again now, really laugh, something around his edges seemed to sag a little, sad and defeated and lost.

Talking about those babies made him so happy. Anyone in his right mind would know having those babies was the craziest idea of all time. Some men might be capable of picking a surrogate and being a single dad to their dead wife’s babies. I mean, I didn’t know any of those men, but they did probably exist.

I thought back to the last time I had seen Greer alive, how even that close to death, Parker had made her laugh, how he had kept the trauma he was facing zipped up inside himself and dedicated everything to her, given her his all. Hell, maybe he could do it. Maybe he was that man. Maybe I had stumbled into that clinic and seen that record and made that phone call because Parker was supposed to be a single dad.