They Held My Funeral While I Was Still Breathing. Then My Seven-Year-Old Nephew Looked Into the Coffin and Said, “Mommy, Aunt Madelyn Is Looking at Me”

Not mourned, not even hated — appraised.

Christopher did not stand over my coffin raging at me, or weeping crocodile tears, or doing any of the things a person does about another person.

He stood there doing sums.

Five hundred thousand from the policy.

The house, which would move faster if they didn’t linger.

The building downtown, once the paperwork cleared.

I had spent seven years being his wife, and my sister had spent thirty-two years being my sister, and in the end I was, to the pair of them, a number — an asset that had become more valuable dead than alive, and so had been converted.

That is the coldest thing I know about what they did, colder even than the drug or the box.