Vomit rose up the back of my throat, and I ran out of the room to be sick in the hall trash can. Hospice. I still hadn’t accepted that my bright, beautiful light could ever go out.

We made a pact on the way home to quit everything. And we did. We went to North Carolina. We went to Amsterdam. We went to Utah and Bali, LA and Bora Bora, Hawaii and Hong Kong. For almost an entire year, we traveled and sunned ourselves and made love and acted like we were on an extended vacation. I could pretend she was okay. But there were subtle changes—circles under her eyes, a change in her breath, the naps that she had to take in the afternoon.

The morning she woke up and said quietly, “Parker, take me back to Palm Beach,” I wanted to jump out the window and end it. I couldn’t bear the thought of living even a moment without her. I didn’t want this part. I couldn’t handle this part.

As Greer got sicker over those last few weeks, I kept my promise. Her beautiful hair had grown back and was almost to her chin. Her nurse—the same nurse they had hired for her mother only a few years earlier—did her hair and makeup every day so visitors could see the old Greer, not the dying one. That was maybe the worst part for me, because, even though she was leaving me, when she was made-up, she barely looked sick. I could sit across from her on the couch and pretend things were fine, that this was just a bump in the road.

To watch the person you love more than yourself suffer is hell on earth. But even then, I couldn’t be wholly sorry. Because we had one full, memorable year.

A year had never felt faster.

And now two weeks had never felt longer.

Every day I wavered between piercing fear that the embryos hadn’t taken, overwhelming joy that they had, and crippling panic over either.

Amelia swore she didn’t need an appointment to tell her what she already knew. She was nauseous and bloated and moody. She was positive she was pregnant. She had been cooking up a storm for the past couple of weeks. I tried to take her out, but she insisted that the babies needed an organic diet. She had a little calendar on the fridge where she was keeping tally of the fruits and vegetables she ate daily to make sure she got at least ten servings. That seemed like a lot to me, but I was unendingly grateful for the time and attention she was paying to my future child or, if things had gone really well, children. And we had gotten into quite a rhythm with our cooking. I’d play one of her Spotify playlists over the house’s sound system and pour a glass of flavored sparkling water in a wine glass for her, an Old Fashioned for me, on which Amelia insisted upon burning an orange rind. I knew already that I would never be able to drink it any other way now.