I did not yet know how to grieve a person who had never existed, whose kindness I now had to understand as a costume he’d worn to get close enough to bury me.

That grief came later, and it was worse than the box.

Chapter 9 — The Toxicology

At the hospital, the blood tests came back fast, and they told a simple story: my blood was heavy with a powerful sedative that I had never once been prescribed and had never knowingly taken in my life.

The detective took my statement that same afternoon, at my bedside.

I gave him all of it — the forty-two-thousand-dollar wire transfer, the mug of warm milk my sister had handed me, the conversation I’d overheard from inside the coffin, the five-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy.