I should probably tell you, at this point, about my engagement party. It was in October. My mother had been diagnosed two months earlier. She was still mobile. She was still — as her oncologist said — "very much present." She came to my engagement party. She stayed for ninety-seven minutes. In those ninety-seven minutes she told my fiancé's mother that Graham was "settling," informed my cousin's pregnant wife that she looked "exhausted," cornered my maid of honor in the bathroom to say she thought I was "making a huge mistake," and spent the last fifteen minutes loudly telling a group of my friends about the time I had shoplifted a tube of mascara in high school — a story I had told her in confidence fourteen years earlier. She left. Three people came up to me that night and asked, with the careful tone people use when they're about to say something they've been nervous about, whether my mother was always like that. Graham and I drove home. In the car, he said, "Okay. I get it now. I'm sorry I questioned you."