A minute. One minute everything was great and the next it was terrible; one minute Greer was breathing and the next she wasn’t; one minute Amelia and I were having babies and the next we weren’t. I hated minutes.

All I knew was that, as bad as this minute was, I didn’t want it to be over. Because I had come to depend on Amelia. I loved waking up to her making eggs in the morning, seeing her curled up with her book and herbal tea at night. When this minute was over, she was going to be gone.

“I can’t,” Amelia said through her tears.

And I realized that, even though I had sworn I would never be with anyone else, even though I felt in my bones that Greer was the only woman for me, Amelia was a part of my heart. She always had been. And when she walked out that door, the part of me that had come back to life with her was going to die all over again.

My saving grace was that I had driven us. I had a sickening feeling that if I hadn’t, she would have gotten in the car and left, maybe forever. I could imagine how she was feeling. Truly. Because I was feeling it, too. A sense of loss and helplessness and wondering whether you would ever get what you really, really wanted. But what I hadn’t predicted is when she broke the silence in the car by saying, “I failed you, Parker. I am so sorry.”

I slammed on the brakes and pulled the car over like my dad used to do when Mason and I were fighting in the back seat. “Amelia, you could never, ever fail me. How can you even say that?”

She looked incredulous. “Of course I failed you. I had one job. I can’t even do something most women can do by accident.”

I had to wonder then if this had more to do with her inability to have children of her own than with this loss—or at least if her grief was split. I wondered if this loss also emphasized all the other ones this year: Thad, her job. I could feel her world crumbling. I wanted to put it back together for her, but I didn’t know how. And even if I did, would she want that?

She put her head in her hands, crying. “Parker, you were so happy. So, so happy. I hadn’t seen you smile like that since I put the boards on the tree so you could climb it.”

I laughed then, remembering being four years old and the goddess Amelia paying attention to me. That was all I had ever wanted.

“You got to the top of that tree, and I have never seen you so happy, Parker. It was the best feeling in the world. And I thought I would give that feeling to you again, but this time, I couldn’t get you to the top of the tree.”