A grieving mother making wild accusations at her own daughter’s funeral — pointing at a child’s ghost story as evidence, disrupting a solemn service, having to be escorted out by security while the mourners looked away in pity.

He did not need to prove me wrong.

He only needed me to look exactly like what I was about to look like.

Every instinct he had was bent toward provoking the scene and then using it, letting my desperation become the proof of my instability, so that anything I said afterward — about the marks, about the cremation, about him — would be dismissed as the raving of a woman the whole congregation had watched come apart.

It was a good trap.