I never expected to bury my child. Rain stitched the April air into a gray veil as the mahogany casket sank, and every drop felt like a nail. People clustered beneath black umbrellas in Greenwood Cemetery, but an invisible border had formed around me—an empty ring of space no one dared cross. Thirty-eight years old, my Richard. Sixty-two for me. The math was obscene.
Across the trench of wet earth, Amanda stood immaculate and untouched by weather—black Chanel like a scalpel, makeup camera-ready, expression groomed for sympathy without once breaking into grief. My daughter-in-law. Three years legally grafted to my family tree and somehow positioned at the center of the ceremony, while I—who had raised Richard alone after cancer took his father—hovered at the margins like an uninvited ghost.
