My Husband and My Mother Poisoned Us and Put Us in the Ground. They Forgot One Thing: I Woke Up First

I chose them for the two boys sitting in the front row, watching their mother speak.

Because I understood, in that courtroom, that this was the version of the story they were going to carry for the rest of their lives, and that the version was, to some degree, mine to shape.

I could stand there and be a broken thing, a woman destroyed by what had been done to her — and it would have been the truth, and no one would have blamed me for it, and my sons would have learned that what happened to them was the kind of wound that breaks a person forever.

Or I could stand there and give them a different truth, one that was also real: that we had been buried and had not stayed buried, that we had been meant to be an ending and had turned ourselves into a beginning, that the very darkness intended to erase us had been, instead, the ground we grew up out of.