A faint, startled almost-smile touched his mouth and died. He nodded.
After dinner she washed dishes while he dried. The ordinary chore felt like walking a tightrope over a canyon. When they finished, she said, "Guest room," and he took a pillow and went without argument.
Camille lay in their bed alone and stared at the ceiling. She thought of the kitchen at midnight. The vibrating pocket. The question she had asked — whose phone is this — and how the answer had been both smaller and larger than an affair. She thought of ten years ending and not ending. She thought of a man on a step who had already been buried and was still learning how to stand.
She did not sleep well. She did not need to. Morning would come again, and with it the harder work of telling the truth to the people who still thought Isaiah Malik Brooks was only a date range on stone.
***
***
On Saturday Camille went to work because staying home had begun to feel like floating in a jar. She processed invoices. She answered emails. A coworker asked if she was okay and Camille said she had a family situation, which was both accurate and comically insufficient. At lunch she sat in her car and called Isaiah for the ten minutes she had promised, a day early, because waiting until Sunday felt like performing composure.
"How was the meeting?" she asked.
"Honest," Isaiah said. "I talked about you without using you as a trophy."
"Good. Talk about yourself more. I am not your sobriety mascot."
"Copy that."
"Julian is sleeping in the guest room. Do not ask him for updates on my heart. He does not speak for me."
"I won't."
"Mama wants to cook for you next week. I told her not yet. When it happens, you will eat and you will listen and you will not make a toast."
Isaiah exhaled a short laugh that cracked. "No toasts. Got it."
Camille stared at the dashboard. "I keep waiting to feel only one thing. It never arrives. I am furious and relieved and suspicious and weirdly grateful you are ugly with living instead of handsome on a program. That mix is going to be my weather for a while."
"I can live in your weather," Isaiah said. "I lived in worse."