She called in sick to work with a voice that sounded almost normal. She texted her mother a bland good morning and received a heart emoji back, and the ordinariness of that exchange nearly knocked her down.
Around noon she walked to the cemetery.
The stone was still there. ISAIAH MALIK BROOKS. Beloved son and brother. The dates flanking a dash that now looked like a fraud. Camille stood with her hands in her sweater pockets and did not speak to the ground. Speaking to the ground would have been another kind of theater. She only looked until looking hurt, then walked home under a sky that had the nerve to be blue.
Julian returned midafternoon. He stood in the doorway of the living room as if waiting for permission to enter his own house.
"He is checked in," Julian said. "Room 214. He asked me to tell you he will not come back unless you say so."
Camille sat on the couch with her feet tucked under her. "Sit down."
He sat in the chair across from her, not beside her. That small choice was the first intelligent thing he had done in twenty-four hours.
"I need you to understand something," Camille said. "Last night in the kitchen, when I found that phone, I thought you were ending us with someone else's body. That particular knife did not go in. A different knife did. I am still bleeding from it. You do not get to ask how long the bleeding lasts."
"I won't."
"You will want to. People who have been carrying a secret always want the confession to count as the repair."
Julian looked at his hands. "What do you want me to do?"
"Be quiet when I am angry. Answer when I ask. Sleep in the guest room until I say otherwise. Do not turn Isaiah into a project that makes you feel useful while I do the harder work. And when Mama learns — if I decide you can be there — you will tell her the truth without making yourself the hero who kept a broken man alive."
"Okay."
Camille studied him. Ten years. The engagement kitchen. The funeral umbrella. The late shifts that were sometimes real and sometimes cover. The man who had loved her enough to hold her through a burial and not enough to refuse a terrified brother's bargain.
"I loved you yesterday," she said. "I love you today in a damaged way. Those two facts can sit in the same room without making a decision for me."
Julian nodded. Tears slid down without drama.
"And Isaiah?" he asked carefully.