Her sister replied immediately: Always. Love you. Whatever it is, you're not crazy for feeling it.
Aisha put her own phone face down. She kept the black one on the nightstand like a bomb with a snooze button.
Around three she unlocked it again and typed, with Darius's unlocked session still active, a message she did not send:
This is Aisha. I know now. I am angry and I am not going to hurt you for his failures. We will talk tomorrow.
She deleted it. The girl did not need a midnight stranger in her grief thread. The girl needed a father who showed up in daylight.
Aisha slept in pieces. In one dream Lena the stepmother was polishing silver and saying, See? Everyone becomes the visitor eventually. In another, a teenage girl with Darius's eyes stood in their kitchen and asked where the cups were, and Aisha could not remember which cupboard was hers to offer.
---
Morning arrived with the ordinary violence of weekdays: light, birds, a garbage truck on Linden Grove. Aisha showered in the guest bath, dressed in jeans and a soft gray sweater, and came downstairs to find Darius already at the table with coffee he had made the way she liked it — wrong on purpose, sweet, a little too much cream.
She did not thank him. She sat.
"Speaker," she said, and placed the black phone on the table.
He called.
Layla answered on the second ring, voice thick with sleep and then sharpening. "Dad?"
"Hey, baby. I'm here. I have Aisha with me. You're on speaker. She knows. I told her everything last night."
Silence. Then, carefully: "Is she mad?"
Aisha leaned toward the phone. Her voice surprised her with its steadiness. "Yes. I am mad at your father. I am not mad at you. You didn't build the lie. You lived inside it."
Another silence. A small sound that might have been a swallowed sob. "Okay. Hi. I'm Layla."
"Hi, Layla. I'm Aisha."
"Are you... are you going to make him stop talking to me?"