Noah and I met at a rooftop bar in Charlotte the summer he turned twenty-nine. He was the kind of man who opened doors and remembered the names of your coworkers after meeting them once. His mother Marguerite adored me from the first dinner — she pressed my hands in both of hers and told me "take care of my boy, he's soft underneath." I laughed then. I didn't understand yet. For three years of our relationship, he was exactly what he seemed. Funny, patient, ambitious, the first person my mother called when my father had his stroke. Then Marguerite started getting tired, then her skin went gray, then the doctors said the word "metastatic" in a room with those awful fluorescent lights, and I watched my boyfriend become a different man in slow motion. The person who came out the other side of her funeral was not the man I met at the rooftop bar. He was someone else wearing Noah's face. The drinking started small. At first I didn't even think it was a problem.