I had gone to that grave perhaps a hundred times across my life — on her supposed birthday, on the anniversary of a death that never happened, on ordinary hard days when I needed to feel close to the mother I had lost.

I had knelt on that grass and spoken to a headstone with her name on it.

I had left flowers there, and pulled weeds from around the marker, and once, as a teenager, lain down on the ground beside it and cried until I could not cry anymore, because I wanted so badly to be near her and this cold rectangle of earth was the closest I could get.

And there had been nothing under it.

No mother, no coffin, no body — just soil, and a lie carved in stone, and above it a grown woman pouring out her grief to a box of dirt while the mother she was grieving lived and breathed a few miles away.

I did not know whether to feel robbed or saved.