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”

“I was so scared, at the house,” Delilah said, her fingers at the pendant.

“That you’d taste it.

That you’d stop.”

“You did fine,” he said.

And then he laughed — a low, dry, satisfied laugh, the laugh of a man whose plan is going exactly the way he built it.

“She never suspected a thing.

She trusted you right up until the end.”

I am not going to set down here the details of what they did to me, the how of it, because those details are not a thing anyone needs written out, and because they are the least important part of what I learned in that box.