It could mean awake.
***
On the morning of the camera call, Evelyn sat in her favorite chair with a cardigan buttoned wrong and refused Camille's offer to fix it. "If I look a little wrong, that is honest," she said. Isaiah appeared on the screen from the hotel desk, plain wall behind him, eyes tired and open. Evelyn asked him where he had been the Christmas after the funeral. He told her: a shelter, then a couch, then a blackout he was lucky to leave. Evelyn asked him why Julian and not her. He said he could survive Camille's rage easier than her sorrow, and he had been wrong about that math. Evelyn cried without turning the camera away. Camille kept time. Five minutes became twelve because Evelyn asked for seven more, and Camille allowed it without making the allowance a pardon.
After the call, Evelyn said, "I am angry at God and hospitals and ice and men who think silence is love."
"Join the club," Camille said.
"Is there coffee?"
"Always."
They drank it on the porch where Isaiah had stood with the blanket. Evelyn looked at the step like it might still hold his shape. "He does not get to move back into my house," she said. "Not yet. Maybe not ever in the old way. But he gets to be called on Sundays if he stays reachable."
Camille nodded. "Reachable is the new minimum."
When Camille drove home, Julian was in the kitchen scrambling eggs without being asked. He plated two and waited. She sat. She ate. She did not thank him like a woman granting absolution. She did thank him for the pepper, because pepper was pepper.
"Isaiah did fine," she said. "Mama did better than fine. You and I are still a separate problem."
"I know."
"I am going to keep sleeping alone for now. I am going to keep asking hard questions. I am going to visit that stone one more time and decide what we do about a name that is no longer only a memorial. You are going to keep telling the truth even when the truth makes you look worse."
"I can do that."
"We will find out," Camille said, and for the first time since the green jacket glowed in her hand, the sentence did not feel like a cliff. It felt like a road with no promised scenery, only the requirement to keep walking with her eyes open.
Inside, something true had finally been allowed to stand in the kitchen without being mistaken for the end of everything.
And that — unfinished, unforgiving, awake — was where the story of the midnight phone actually began.