“Mommy, Aunt Elena is looking at me.”

Monica froze. Darius whipped around toward the casket. I shut my eyes just in time and held my breath until my lungs burned.

“Don’t say such silly things, Nico,” she whispered.

“She is looking at me,” the boy insisted. “It’s open right here.”

I felt his little finger pointing right at the crack. There was a silence so heavy that even my mother stopped praying.

“Kids say the darndest things…” Darius muttered, but his voice came out shaky.

I heard their footsteps approaching. Every click of Monica’s heels against the floor was like a hammer in my head. The smell of the candle wax and the sweet perfume made my stomach churn. I forced myself to stay still, even though a sharp pang in my chest urged me to sit up and claw at both of them.

The lid creaked.

A hand pushed it slightly. More light flooded through the crack. I kept my eyes closed, praying for the first time in years that they wouldn’t notice my eyelashes trembling.

“See?” Monica said, closer now, her breath on my face. “She’s just the same.”

Same. As if I were already an object.

“I told you,” Darius replied. “Calm down.”

Then he touched my neck. He was checking to make sure the chain was gone. That touch ignited a fury so vivid it nearly gave me away. I wanted to bite his fingers. I wanted to open my eyes and watch him choke on his “perfect widower” act.

But I held back. Because if they were capable of drugging me, holding a wake for me while I was alive, and planning to collect my insurance, they were capable of finishing the job right then and there.

My mom started praying again, louder, almost shouting the rosary mysteries, and someone in the room asked for coffee. A dog barked outside. Life went on as if nothing were happening while I learned, lying in my own casket, that a person can be killed before they are even buried.

Darius lowered his voice. “Tonight they’re taking her straight to the funeral home, and then to the cemetery tomorrow morning. Just hold on for a few more hours and that’s it.”

“I don’t want to go,” Monica said. “I can’t watch when they lower her in.”

“Well, you better learn,” he snapped. “We’ve already done the worst part.”

The worst part. I grit my teeth so hard I felt blood in my gums.

Nico was still there. I knew because I could smell his strawberry lollipop. Then, very softly, as if he were talking to me and not them, he said: “Auntie, if you’re alive, blink.”

It nearly broke me. That child was the only clean thing in that entire rotten room. I wanted to do it. I wanted to open an eye and ask him for help. But before I could decide, I felt another presence approaching.

My mother. Mothers recognize even the strange silences.

She dragged a chair over to the casket and sighed as if she had been tired for a thousand years. Then, in a low voice—not the voice of a mourner, but that of a cornered woman—she said: “That’s enough, Darius.”

My soul stopped cold.

“Ma’am, don’t start,” he replied.

“I didn’t want this.”

The whole room went silent. Even Nico stopped sucking on his lollipop.

“I didn’t want this,” my mother repeated, now crying for real. “You said she was just going to sleep, that they were going to admit her, make it look like a breakdown, and then everything would be fixed. You didn’t say you were going to put her in a casket.”

The world flipped inside my head. My mother. My own mother knew.

Monica began to sob.

“We can’t take anything back now,” Darius said coldly. “If you open your mouth, you go down with us.”

“She’s my daughter,” my mother whispered.

“And you signed too,” he said.

She signed. I felt nausea, rage, a shame so brutal it burned me more than the poison in the milk. My mother—the one who had done my hair for graduation, the one who called me “my baby”—had signed my death warrant like someone authorizing a simple surgery.

The chair creaked. I heard the thud of her hands against the wood of the casket. “Forgive me, Elena,” she said.

That was the first time I opened my eyes. Not much. Just enough to look, through the crack, into one of hers. My mother recoiled with a gasp. Our eyes met.

I’ll never forget the look on her face. It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t love. It was terror. Pure terror.

“Darius…” she gasped.

He turned around. I didn’t hold back anymore.

I jammed my fingers into the opening, pushed with all the strength I had left, and the casket lid flew open, knocking a candle to the floor. My portrait fell off the table. Someone screamed. My Aunt Linda dropped her rosary as if she’d seen the devil.

I sat halfway up, coughing, my dress clinging to my body and my hair stiff with sweat.

Monica was the first to recoil. Her hands went to her neck. My chain shimmered there, against her skin.

“Give it back,” I told her, but my voice came out broken, hollow, worse than a ghost’s.

Nico started to cry. My mother fell to her knees. And Darius… Darius didn’t move. He just looked at me with a coldness that made me realize his fear had vanished very quickly.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

Then he reached inside his jacket. He pulled out something I couldn’t quite see. But I did see Monica’s face contort as she screamed:

“No, not here!”