Parker SOUTHERN CROSS

IN THE BACK OF THE Uber after the party, I knew I was going to be exhausted at work tomorrow. I knew I should have left earlier. But I also couldn’t stop doing something I hadn’t really done in a long time: smiling.

The day, the dancing, the laughing. Had I imagined it? Or had there been a moment between Amelia and me as we said goodbye? Everyone in Cape Carolina knew I had always had a soft spot for Amelia—well, maybe everyone knew except for Amelia.

Once, I had believed that maybe she had a soft spot for me, too. Our mothers threw an epic end-of-summer party every year on the beach in front of the Oyster, the beach’s oldest hotel. They invited all their friends, and they insisted that Robby, Mason, Amelia, and I be there every year.

But the summer after I graduated college, Robby was on his honeymoon and Mason had wormed his way out by claiming he was sick. (Hungover was more like it.) So that left Amelia and me as the only two members of the under-fifty crowd.

We had exchanged hellos and caught up briefly. But then the sea of revelers wanted to ask me about my postcollege plans and to ask Amelia—much to my dismay—about potential wedding bells with her boyfriend. As it started to get dark and the tiki torches were lit and bonfires stoked on the beach, Amelia caught my eye across the party and gestured with her head out toward the sand.

I nodded, grabbed a bottle of champagne from the bar—the bartender protesting mildly—removed my shoes, and followed her down the beach, to a quiet spot away from the party. She sat down, wrapping her arms around her knees, and I followed suit.

“Don’t get views like this in New York, do you?” she asked, smiling.

I shook the champagne just a little. As the cork popped and the bubbles exploded into the night, Amelia squealed. I handed her the bottle. “Ladies first.”

She took a swig and handed it back to me.

I looked up. “There is nothing like a Southern sky,” I said. I hadn’t been alone with Amelia, this close to her, since the summer before I left for college. As I took a swig of the champagne and handed the bottle back to her, I told myself the jitters in my stomach were from the drink, not her.

“How’s Daniel?” I asked casually.

She looked at me, rolled her eyes, and took another sip. “Between you and me?” I nodded. “Daniel cheated on me with the bartender at HMF.”

HMF was one of the bars at the Breakers. “He did not.”

“Oh, I assure you, he did.”

“I’m assuming you haven’t told your mother? Because from the talk around the party, everyone is expecting a proposal any day now.”

She sighed, handed me the champagne, and lay down on her back on the still-warm sand, her arms behind her head. “Can I be honest with you?”

“Always.” I looked over at her. Her serene face, her hair spread in the sand, the way the moon shone on her blue eyes, making them vibrant even in the dark… I had dated my fair share of beautiful women, but for me, there would always be only one Amelia Saxton.

“I felt relieved.”

I laughed, looking out over the roaring ocean, raising the champagne to my mouth again.

“Why?”

“I didn’t love him. My father loved that he was a scratch golfer. My mother loved his family and his job and how handsome he was. I tried to love him. I swear I did. But when I found out he’d cheated, I kind of felt relieved. He was crying and begging for forgiveness, and it was so easy to walk away. I realized I didn’t even feel enough for him to shed a tear about it. Am I an awful person?”

I lay down beside her, twisting the base of the bottle in the sand so it wouldn’t spill. I turned my head toward her. “Amelia, you are a lot of things. Awful will never be one of them.”

She met my eyes and smiled, making my stomach do that thing again that I could no longer pretend was from the champagne. Was she sending me a signal here?

She pointed up to the sky and said, “Is that the Southern Cross?”

I laughed.

“What?”

“Amelia, you can’t see the Southern Cross from here. You have to be in the Southern Hemisphere. Occasionally you can catch it in Key West or maybe Texas, but never here.”

She laughed, too. “But doesn’t that look like a cross?”

I was pretty sure she had had too much champagne. “I’ve seen it,” I said. “On my semester at sea.”

“I’d like to see it,” she said.

“I’d like to show you,” I responded, feeling brave.

She turned toward me then, and the way she smiled, I knew what she said next was going to change my life. And it did. But not in the way I wanted. “Park, I have missed you. I don’t think I realized it, but I have.”

I couldn’t breathe. My heart was beating out of my chest. Is this actually happening?

“You are the little brother I never had.” She turned back toward the sky and said, “Is that the Big Dipper?” Then laughed. “Am I the worst amateur astronomer you’ve ever known?”

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.