Not proof.

Just a crack, a single detail that did not fit, that made me stop accepting and start looking.

And once I was looking again, once the question was reopened, everything else that had been invisible while the question was closed began, one by one, to become visible: the independent funeral home, the rushed moving of the body, Marcus’s wrong urgency, and finally, most of all, my daughter’s calm insistence that her father was not dead.

None of those things had changed.