My name is Diane. My son Tyler is nineteen, home from his first year of college, and for weeks he’d been telling me about someone new — someone he was finally ready for me to meet. So that Sunday, I made an effort. I cleaned the house, made a pot roast, put out the good dishes I usually save for holidays. Tyler had dated before, but I’d never heard him talk about anyone the way he talked about Noah — hated mushrooms, played guitar badly but confidently, once walked twenty minutes across campus in the rain because Tyler forgot his laptop. By Sunday afternoon I felt like I already knew him. I was genuinely excited.
The doorbell rang around four. Tyler practically ran to answer it, grinning wider than I’d seen in a long time. Voices in the hallway, then he walked into the kitchen with a young man beside him. “Mom, this is Noah.”
