I knew then that she wouldn’t try again; it wouldn’t be fair of me to ask her. This situation was so complicated; how much more complicated could it become if we had actually had the babies? I thought back to my file of surrogates. I wondered if, knowing what I knew now, any of them would ever be enough. The thought of one of those strangers carrying my baby made me feel so alone.

I took Amelia’s hand in mine and nudged her face with my finger so she was looking at me. “That day with the boards and that day you had the embryos implanted, I wasn’t happy because of the end result—or the potential end result.”

She looked confused. “You weren’t?”

I shook my head. “I was happy because the girl whose attention I had always wanted, the person I had always thought was the queen of the universe, would do something so huge for me.” I paused. “Amelia, then and now, you made me feel like the most important person in the world. That’s why I was so happy. And that’s why I’m still so happy.”

That wasn’t strictly true. I wasn’t happy. But that she would try to do this for me helped. I put the car in drive and made the way back to our house, hoping that I had satisfied her. I was afraid that she was going to leave, that this adventure was going to be over.

I thought of Greer again. I thought of her pain that last night, how rigid her body had been but how she relaxed into my arms when the nurse gave her a shot of morphine. She slept. I held her all night, didn’t move, wouldn’t have dreamed of getting up, wouldn’t have dared to fall asleep. In her last moments, I knew I should be feeling something like relief for her.

But I would never, ever get to a place where I could feel like my wife, my beautiful, perfect, vibrant wife, being gone was okay.

I felt her breathing get shallow and fast. I recognized that it had stopped. But still, I lay there quietly, knowing that this was the last time I would ever hold her in my arms. Who she was lying there was different from the woman she had been. I don’t know if it was because I had mourned for so long already, or if she was with me then, but I felt preternaturally calm.

I got up, kissed her on the forehead—the lips felt wrong—and said, “Goodbye, my girl. You are my only love, and I will spend the rest of my life honoring that.”

The only thing that gave me the courage to tell the nurse that she was gone, to leave her there in the bed we had shared, was the knowledge that the person lying there wasn’t my wife. That was just a shell.

As the paramedics started to arrive, I sat down in the hall and, just like that night almost eighteen months earlier in the shower, sobbed. Only, this time, Greer wasn’t there to tell me it would be okay. And that’s how I knew it never would be.