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’ll disappear.

And you know how unstable Delilah is — she’s already telling the police whatever she thinks will save her.

Don’t let her stories decide this.”

I sat and looked at him for a long moment.

Even here, in a jumpsuit, behind glass, facing what he was facing, he was negotiating my life like a line item on a contract.

“Do you want to know,” I said quietly, “what I actually heard, lying in that coffin?”

He didn’t answer.