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.