My Son Refused to Leave the Space Beneath His Baby Sister's Crib — Then at 2 A.M. I Heard Him Whisper the Promise That Made Me Call the Police
Chapter 1: The Boy Who Wished on Every Candle
Toby had been asking for a baby since he was three years old.
He asked at Christmas, writing it on his list in crooked crayon between a fire truck and a puppy. He asked every birthday, squeezing his eyes shut over the candles and then telling us his wish anyway, because he never understood why it had to be a secret. He asked when his best friend Marcus got a baby brother, and again when the neighbors brought home twins.
"Is it my turn yet?" he'd say, as though babies were handed out in order, like turns on the slide.
It took us four years and one heartbreak I still don't talk about. By the time the second pink line showed up, I was thirty-nine and afraid to hope. I didn't tell Toby until I was nearly five months along. When I finally did, he ran three laps around the kitchen island and then stopped, breathless, and put his ear against my stomach.
"Hi," he whispered. "I'm your brother. I've been waiting for you."
Junie was born on a gray morning in late September at St. Columba Regional, after nineteen hours of labor. I remember the room going quiet in a way that didn't feel right. I remember the pediatrician, Dr. Imani Rhee, sitting down on the edge of the bed instead of standing, which is how I knew before she said a word.
Down syndrome. Trisomy 21. A heart murmur they wanted to watch. Low muscle tone. She said the words gently, one at a time, and after each one Grant's hand tightened around mine.
That night, after he went home to sleep, I lay awake looking at my daughter in the plastic bassinet and let myself think the ugly, frightened thoughts I would never say out loud. Was it because I waited too long? Was it something I ate, something I did? Would she ever call me Mama? Would people stare?
Then Toby came the next afternoon.
Grant's mother, Loretta, brought him. She stood in the doorway in her camel coat with her purse held in front of her like a shield. She looked at the bassinet the way you look at a dent in a new car.
Toby didn't notice anything. He washed his hands twice, the way the nurse showed him, and climbed into the big chair with his arms held out in a careful circle. When the nurse set Junie in them, his whole face changed. He went still and solemn and soft.
"She's perfect," he said.
I had to turn toward the window so he wouldn't see me cry.
Loretta cleared her throat. "Did they not test for this? During the pregnancy?"
"Mom," Grant said quietly.
"I'm only asking. There are tests now."
I didn't answer. I watched Toby touch Junie's tiny ear with one fingertip, as if she were made of soap bubbles.
Loretta moved in with us the week we came home. It was Grant's idea. I was recovering from a long labor, Grant had to go back to the warehouse after five days, and his mother had been a widow for three years in a big empty house across the county in Ashby Ferry. "She wants to help," he said. "Let her help. Please."
So I let her.
For the first two weeks, Toby was Junie's shadow. He chose her outfits every morning, holding up two sleepers and debating like it was a matter of national importance. He sang "You Are My Sunshine" whenever she fussed, always off-key and always all the way through. He showed her photo to the mailman, the cashier at Halvorsen's Market, and his entire second-grade class. "That's my baby," he'd say. Not "my sister." My baby.
Then, on the fifteenth night, I got up for the 3 a.m. feeding and found the nursery door half open.
Toby was on the floor, flat on his back under Junie's crib, with his pillow and his dinosaur blanket. The moon-shaped night-light painted a pale stripe across his cheek.
I almost laughed. I knelt and touched his hair. "Sweetheart. You have your own bed."
He blinked up at me, instantly awake, as if he'd only been resting his eyes.
"I know," he said. "I just want to sleep here."
I carried him back to his room. He was heavier than I remembered. He didn't argue, didn't fuss, just let me tuck him in and closed his eyes.
At six the next morning, I found him under the crib again.
His small fingers were curled around one of the white wooden bars, holding on, even in his sleep.
---
Chapter 2: The Whisper on the Monitor
It happened the next night, and the night after that.
I tried everything I could think of. I let him fall asleep in our bed. I put a sleeping bag on his floor and told him it was a camping trip. I promised him a new Lego set if he could stay in his room for three nights in a row. Every morning, without fail, I found him beneath the crib with his pillow wedged against the wall and his hand around that same bar.
Loretta watched all of this from the kitchen table, stirring her coffee with a small, tight smile.
"You're feeding it," she said on the fifth morning. "Stop allowing this nonsense. He needs to learn that the baby isn't the center of everything. Jealous children act out. Grant did the same when his cousin came to stay."
"He's not jealous," I said. "He adores her."
"Adoring and jealous aren't opposites, Corinne." She set down her spoon. "He wants attention, and you're giving it to him by running in there at all hours. You look terrible, by the way. You should let me take the night feedings."
I did look terrible. I knew it. I hadn't slept more than two hours in a row since September. My body still ached. Junie was a slow eater, and every bottle took forty minutes of coaxing because her mouth muscles tired so easily. Some nights I cried in the shower so no one would hear.
So when Loretta offered, over and over, to watch Junie so I could rest or shower, I said yes more often than I should have.
That was when I started noticing.
Every single time Loretta went into the nursery, Toby appeared. I'd hear her slippers on the hallway carpet, and within a minute I'd hear his feet too, quick and light. If he was eating breakfast, he'd abandon his cereal. If he was building with his blocks, he'd leave the tower half-finished. He'd stand in the nursery doorway with his arms crossed, saying nothing, just watching.
"He's like a little guard dog," Loretta said once, laughing. But her eyes weren't laughing.
Then, one Saturday afternoon, I came out of the shower with a towel around my hair and saw it happen.
Loretta was leaning over the crib, reaching for Junie. And Toby, my gentle, rule-following boy who apologized to furniture when he bumped into it, slid between his grandmother and the crib and stood there with his back pressed against the bars.
"Move, please," Loretta said.
He didn't move.
"Toby!" I said sharply. "What are you doing? Let Grandma pick her up."
He looked at me. Something passed across his face, something too old for seven, and then he stepped aside without a word and walked out of the room.
Later, I sat on the edge of his bed. "Buddy, that was rude. What's going on?"
He picked at the edge of his blanket. "Nothing."
"Are you upset about the baby? It's okay if you are."
"I love Junie."
"I know you do. Then why—"
"Can I go to sleep now?"
I let it go. I was too tired not to. I told Grant that night, and he rubbed his eyes and said, "He's seven. Kids get weird. Mom raised three of us. She knows what she's doing."
There was one more thing I didn't mention to anyone, because it seemed too small. Twice that week, I'd woken in the night to the baby monitor's display gone dark. No static, no little green sound lights. I'd assumed the battery was loose. Both times I'd jiggled it and gone back to sleep.
On Thursday, at 2 a.m., the monitor woke me.
Not crying. Whispering.
I lay frozen for a second, listening to the soft hiss of it. Then I slid out of bed without waking Grant and padded down the dark hallway in my socks.
The nursery door was open a crack. The moon night-light was on. Toby was lying beneath the crib, his blanket kicked off, one hand gripping the bar so hard his knuckles had gone pale.
"It's okay, Junie," he whispered up toward the mattress.
I stopped in the doorway.
"I won't fall asleep this time."
Something cold moved down my spine.
"I won't let Grandma do it again."
"Toby?"
He jerked so hard he bumped his head on the crib frame. I was on my knees beside him before I knew I'd moved.
"Sweetheart. What does Grandma do?"
His eyes filled.
"I promised not to tell."
"Tell me what?"
He looked up at the slats, toward his sleeping sister.
"What Grandma does to Junie," he whispered, "when you and Daddy aren't looking."
---
Chapter 3: The Little Brown Bottle
I made my voice very calm. I don't know how. My hands were shaking so badly that I pressed them flat against my thighs.
"What did you see, baby?"
Toby covered his face with both hands. His shoulders started to jerk. For a long moment the only sound in the room was his breathing and the soft hum of the white-noise machine.
Then he told me.
"The first night Grandma came," he said into his palms, "I got up to get water. And Grandma was in here. She turned off the monitor thing. The little light. She pushed the button."
My stomach dropped.
"She had Junie's bottle. And a little brown bottle, like medicine. With a dropper." He took a ragged breath. "She put drops in it. A lot of drops. And then she fed Junie, and Junie got really, really sleepy. Like floppy. Like my stuffed bunny."
I couldn't breathe.
"I asked what it was," he went on, words tumbling now. "She said it was special medicine so the baby wouldn't cry and keep you up. She said it was a secret between grown-ups and big boys."
"Toby—"
"And then she said—" His voice cracked. "She said babies like Junie are hard. She said they're a burden. She said there's a place for babies like her, where other people take care of them, and if I told you, Junie would have to go live there, and you'd be so sad you'd never stop crying."
I put my arms around him. He was trembling all over, the way he did once when he had a fever of a hundred and three.
"So I didn't tell," he sobbed. "But I didn't want her to do it anymore. So I started sleeping here. Because if I'm here, she can't. And I was doing good, Mommy, I was staying awake. But on Tuesday I fell asleep." He was crying so hard now I could barely understand him. "And when I woke up, the monitor light was off again, and Grandma was walking out, and the bottle was empty. I fell asleep. It's my fault."
"No. No, no. Look at me." I held his wet face in my hands. "None of this is your fault. Do you hear me? You are the bravest person in this house."
He sniffed hard. "There's more."
"Okay."
"I took it." He wiped his nose on his pajama sleeve. "The little bottle. On Tuesday. She left it on the dresser when she went to the bathroom, and I took it and hid it in my sock drawer. So she couldn't use it. But she had another one."
I stood up. My legs didn't feel like mine. I leaned over the crib.
Junie was asleep on her back in her yellow duck sleeper. Her chest was rising and falling. But it was slow. Too slow? I didn't know. I'd never counted before. Her lips were slightly parted, and when I touched her cheek, she didn't stir. Not the little startle, not the rooting turn of her head. Nothing.
"Junie," I said. "Junie, baby."
I picked her up. Her arms hung loose. Her eyelids fluttered once, heavy, and closed again.
I have never been so afraid in my life. Not during the nineteen hours of labor, not when Dr. Rhee sat down on my bed. This fear was different. It had a face, and that face had made my coffee every morning for two weeks.
"Toby," I said, as steadily as I could, "go to your room and get the little bottle out of your sock drawer. Bring it to me. Don't touch the dropper part. Can you do that?"
He nodded and ran.
I held Junie against my chest with one arm and grabbed my phone off the dresser with the other. My thumb missed the numbers twice.
"911, what's your emergency?"
"My daughter is two weeks old," I said. "I think someone has been drugging her. She won't wake up all the way."
The dispatcher's voice changed, went brisk and clear. She asked for the address. I gave it: 14 Larkspur Court. She asked if the baby was breathing. I said yes. She told me to keep her upright and keep talking to her, that help was on the way, and to stay on the line.
Toby came back holding the little brown bottle by the very bottom, the way I'd told him, as if it were something that might b!te. The label said it was an adult nighttime sleep aid. The kind you buy at any pharmacy. It was nearly empty.
I set it on the changing table, very carefully, like evidence. Because it was.
That was when I heard it.
Slippers. Soft and unhurried on the hallway carpet.
The nursery door swung open the rest of the way, and Loretta stood there in her quilted robe, her silver hair pinned up for sleep, her hand resting on the doorframe.
"What on earth is all this fuss?" she said. "It's two in the morning."
Then her eyes moved past me, to the changing table, and landed on the little brown bottle.
---
Chapter 4: Grandma in the Doorway
For one second, maybe two, Loretta's face did nothing at all. Then it rearranged itself into mild, sleepy confusion.
"Is the baby sick?" she asked.
"Don't come in here," I said.
She raised her eyebrows. "Excuse me?"
"Don't come one step closer to my children."
The dispatcher's voice was still coming faintly through the phone in my hand. Ma'am? Ma'am, are you safe? I lifted it to my ear. "My mother-in-law is here. She's the one."
Loretta's lips thinned. "The one what? Corinne, you're exhausted. You're not making sense. Give me the baby, and go lie down."
She took a step forward.
Toby, who had been standing frozen by the dresser, moved. He ran around the crib and planted himself in front of my legs, arms spread wide, the same way he had on Saturday when I scolded him for it. His pajama pants had dinosaurs on them. He came up to my hip.
"No," he said. His voice shook, but he said it.
Loretta looked down at him, and I saw it then. Not confusion. Not sleepiness. Cold, flat irritation, like he was a mosquito.
"Toby," she said softly. "What did we talk about?"
He didn't move.
"What did you tell her?" Loretta's eyes snapped to mine. "Whatever he said, he's a child. Children make things up. He's been jealous of that baby since the day she came home, and you've let him run wild."
"There's medicine in her bottles, Loretta. He watched you do it. He hid the bottle."
"That's ridiculous."
"Then why does my daughter not wake up?"
The hallway light clicked on. Grant appeared behind his mother in his T-shirt and boxers, squinting, hair flattened on one side. "What's going on? Why is everybody yelling?"
"Grant, call your wife down," Loretta said. "She's hysterical. She's accusing me of—I don't even know what."
Grant looked at me. At Junie, limp against my chest. At Toby with his arms out. At the bottle.
"Cor?"
"She's been putting sleep medicine in Junie's bottles," I said. "Since the first week. She turned off the monitor so we wouldn't hear. She told Toby that if he ever told us, we'd send his sister away to a place for babies like her."
Grant's face went white. He turned to his mother.
"Mom?"
Loretta drew herself up. When she spoke again, the softness was gone, and I understood that I was finally hearing her real voice.
"A few drops of antihistamine," she said. "Pediatricians used to recommend it. Every mother in my day did it. That child screams for hours, and you"—she pointed at me—"you were falling apart. I was helping."
"You turned off the monitor," Grant said slowly.
"Because I knew she'd overreact. Look at her." Loretta's gaze slid over me, my milk-stained shirt, my wild hair. "She was too old to be having another baby, Grant. I told you that. And now look what you've got. A broken baby and a wife who can't cope. Somebody in this house had to think clearly."
Too old. Broken. I felt those words go in like splinters, right into the place where I had been lying awake at night asking myself if this was my fault.
But Toby was holding onto my leg, and Junie was breathing against my neck, and I found that I did not care what Loretta thought of me. Not anymore.
"Get out of my daughter's room," I said.
Then the blue and red lights came sweeping across the nursery ceiling, and someone was pounding on the front door.
Grant went to let them in. I heard him on the stairs, heard him say, "Up here, up here," in a voice I'd never heard before. Two paramedics came first, a woman with a braid and a big man carrying a bag, and then a deputy, a broad, quiet man whose name tag said KOWALCZYK.
The paramedic with the braid took Junie from me as gently as anyone has ever taken anything. She checked her breathing, her pulse, shone a tiny light in her eyes. She pressed her knuckle on Junie's breastbone, and Junie gave a thin, weak cry.
"Okay. She's responsive," the paramedic said. "But she's sluggish. We're taking her in now."
Deputy Kowalczyk looked at the bottle on the changing table and then at Loretta, still standing in the corner in her quilted robe.
"Ma'am," he said, "I'm going to need you to sit down in the hallway and stay right there."
"This is my son's house," Loretta said.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "Sit down."
She sat.
Grant looked at his mother on the hallway bench, and for a long moment he just stood there, as if waiting for her to explain it all away.
She didn't.
---
Chapter 5: What the Doctor Found
I rode in the ambulance with Junie. Grant followed with Toby, who refused to be left at home, and who climbed out of the car at St. Columba Regional still in his dinosaur pajamas and his rain boots.
They took Junie behind a curtain in the pediatric emergency bay and put tiny stickers on her chest and a glowing red clip on her toe. The monitor above her bed beeped steadily. I watched the numbers like they were the only thing holding up the ceiling.
At five in the morning, Dr. Rhee came in. She'd been called from home. She had her coat on over pajama pants, and I loved her for it.
"Corinne," she said, and pulled the plastic chair close. "Junie's going to be okay."
I put my face in my hands.
"Her blood work showed diphenhydramine," she said. "That's the antihistamine in the bottle your son found. It's not safe for newborns at all, and in a baby with low muscle tone and a heart murmur, it's especially concerning. It can slow breathing. We'll keep her for at least forty-eight hours to monitor her."
"How much?" Grant's voice cracked. "How much did she get?"
"The level was elevated, but it's already coming down." Dr. Rhee hesitated. "There's something else. Junie's weight is lower than I'd expect at her two-week check. Who's been mixing her bottles?"
Grant and I looked at each other.
"Mom," he said. "Mom insisted. She said she had a system."
"I think the formula may have been diluted," Dr. Rhee said carefully. "Babies who are sedated and underfed cry less. They sleep more. To an exhausted family, that can look like an easy baby."
An easy baby. Loretta had said those exact words to me last week, smiling over her coffee. See? She just needed a firm hand. She's such an easy baby now.
I had thanked her.
Out in the waiting room, a woman with kind gray eyes and a lanyard introduced herself as Petra Lund, a child advocate with the county. She asked if she could talk to Toby, with me in the room. He sat in my lap in a small, bright room with a box of crayons on the table and told her everything again. He didn't cry this time. He spoke slowly and carefully, the way he did when reading aloud in class.
When he got to the part about falling asleep on Tuesday night, his chin wobbled.
"I tried really hard to stay awake," he told her. "I pinched my arm. I counted the stars on the night-light. But I fell asleep anyway."
Petra set down her pen. "Toby, can I tell you something? Grown-up police officers fall asleep on long shifts. Doctors fall asleep. Mommies fall asleep. You stayed awake more nights than anybody could. And when you couldn't, you took the bottle and hid it. Do you know what that's called?"
He shook his head.
"Evidence," she said. "You saved evidence. That's what detectives do."
He looked up at me, astonished.
Around seven, Grant and I sat side by side in the hallway outside Junie's bay with two cups of coffee neither of us drank. He hadn't said much since the house. He kept turning his wedding ring around and around.
"I need to tell you something," he said finally. "About Mom."
I waited.
"She had a brother. Danny. He was born when she was eleven. He had Down syndrome." He stared at the floor tiles. "Her parents sent him away when he was two. To a state home upstate. They told everyone he d!ed. Mom found out he was alive when she was thirty, after her mother passed. She went to see him once. She never went back."
"Grant."
"She told me once, when I was a teenager, that her mother did the right thing. That it was the only decent choice." He pressed his knuckles to his mouth. "I thought she was just bitter. I never thought—I let her move in. I told you to let her help."
I took his hand and held it, ring and all.
"I didn't see it either," I said. "Our son did."
At eight-fifteen, Deputy Kowalczyk came down the hall with a woman in a dark blazer, a detective named Alvarez.
"We searched her room with your husband's permission," Detective Alvarez said. "We found a second bottle of the same medication in her purse, half empty. And this." She held up a folded set of printed pages in a plastic sleeve. "Admission forms for a residential care facility three counties over. For infants. Partially filled out. Your daughter's name is on them."
My vision went white at the edges.
"She's been taken into custody," Alvarez said. "She's asking to speak to her son."
---
Chapter 6: The Words She Couldn't Take Back
Grant didn't go that day. Or the next.
He stayed at the hospital, sitting beside Junie's bassinet with his huge hand resting on her blanket, watching her finish an entire bottle for the first time, slow and stubborn, her little fist curled around his finger. When the nurse wrote down how much she'd eaten, he made her say the number twice.
Junie came home three days later. Loretta did not. A judge had already signed an emergency protective order. She was released on bond to her empty house in Ashby Ferry, charged with child endangerment and administering a harmful substance to a minor.
Three weeks after that, we stood in courtroom 2B at the Danforth County Courthouse for the hearing on the long-term order.
It was a small room with wood paneling and buzzing lights. More people were there than I expected. Two of Loretta's friends from her church in Ashby Ferry, women I'd met at our wedding, sat in the second row in their good coats. A reporter from the county paper. Dr. Rhee, who came on her lunch break. Petra Lund, who winked at Toby when we walked in.
Loretta sat at the respondent's table beside a lawyer in a gray suit. She'd dressed carefully: pearls, a pale blue cardigan, her silver hair set in soft waves. She looked like the grandmother in a cereal commercial.
Her lawyer did what she'd tried to do in my nursery doorway. He talked about a devoted grandmother who'd raised three children. About an outdated but well-meaning practice. About a mother overwhelmed by postpartum exhaustion and a seven-year-old with obvious jealousy issues.
Then Detective Alvarez testified. She described the bottles. The dosing found in Junie's blood. The diluted formula. She held up the admission forms, and the courtroom shifted, a ripple of murmurs. One of the church ladies put her hand over her mouth.
Then the prosecutor played the recording.
I hadn't known it existed until a week before. Our baby monitor, the kind with the app, saved short audio clips whenever it detected sound. Most nights Loretta had switched it off. But on the very first night, before Toby walked in, she'd been a few seconds too slow.
Her voice filled the courtroom, low and clear.
"There. Now you'll hush. Nobody needs to listen to you all night. You'll go somewhere better soon, where they're used to your kind."
Then, a moment later, my son's small, sleepy voice: "Grandma? What's that?"
The courtroom went utterly still. Loretta's lawyer stopped writing.
Loretta turned in her chair and looked at the second row, at her church friends. Neither of them would meet her eyes. One of them stood up, buttoned her coat, and walked out.
When it was Loretta's turn, she stood without being asked. Her lawyer touched her arm, and she shook him off.
"I was protecting my son," she said, and her voice shook with something that sounded almost like righteousness. "My mother did what was necessary, and nobody understood her either. That child will never have a normal life. Corinne is too old and too weak to manage it. Someone had to make the hard choice. I'm the only one in this family who ever has."
Grant stood up.
He wasn't supposed to speak. The judge, a lean woman with reading glasses on a chain, raised an eyebrow but didn't stop him.
"No, Mom," he said. "Danny didn't need a hard choice. He needed a sister who visited." His voice broke, and he steadied it. "My daughter isn't broken. My wife isn't weak. And the only person in our family who made the right choice was a seven-year-old sleeping on the floor."
Loretta stared at him as if he'd struck her.
The judge granted the protective order for the maximum term the law allowed. No contact with either child, no contact with our household. The criminal case would continue, she said, and she suspected the recording would be of interest there as well.
On the courthouse steps afterward, the reporter asked Grant if he'd like to comment.
"Just that my son's a hero," he said, and walked to the car.
That night, I sat on the floor of the nursery while Toby lay in his usual spot under the crib. His hand found the bar.
"Toby," I said, "I need to tell you something important. It's my job to stay awake now."
He turned his head toward me in the moonlight.
"You did it for a long time, all by yourself," I said. "You can put it down. I've got her."
He was quiet for a long time.
"Promise?"
"I promise."
He let go of the bar, very slowly, finger by finger.
---
Epilogue
Junie turned one on a bright, windy Saturday at the end of September.
We had the party in the backyard on Larkspur Court, with a lopsided homemade cake that Toby decorated himself with eleven yellow ducks and one green one, "because she likes to be different." Dr. Rhee came with her two daughters. Petra Lund brought a stuffed lamb. Grant's sister flew in from out of state and cried when she held Junie, because she said Junie had their father's ears.
Junie wore a yellow dress and pulled the bow off her own head four times. She couldn't walk yet. Her physical therapist said she'd get there, in her own time, and Junie was proving to be a person who did everything in her own time. She could clap, though. She clapped at the candles, at the ducks, at the wind, at the dog next door. And when Toby sang "You Are My Sunshine," off-key and all the way through, she grinned her huge gummy grin and shrieked so loudly that everyone laughed.
Loretta pleaded guilty in the spring. She received probation, mandatory parenting-safety classes she'll never need, and a lifetime of no contact. Her church friends stopped calling. She sold the big house in Ashby Ferry and moved somewhere smaller. Grant hasn't spoken to her since the courthouse steps.
But in March, he drove four hours north to a group home in a town called Lisle Hollow, and he met his uncle Danny for the first time. Danny is sixty-three. He loves baseball, peppermint candy, and anyone who will sit still long enough to hear about his model trains. Grant brought him a photo of Junie. Danny looked at it for a long time, then tapped her face with one finger and said, "She looks like me."
Danny came to the birthday party. He sat at the end of the picnic table in a Cubs cap and held Junie on his lap, very carefully, as if she were made of soap bubbles.
Toby watched them from across the yard. Then he came and leaned against me on the porch step.
"Mom?"
"Yeah, bud?"
"Remember when I used to sleep under her crib?"
"I remember."
"I sleep in my bed now."
"I know you do."
He thought about it. "But if she ever needs me, I'll still go."
"I know that too."
That night, after everyone left and the ducks had been eaten, I stood in the nursery doorway. The moon night-light glowed on the wall. Junie was asleep on her back in her yellow dress, one fist raised over her head like she'd won something.
The baby monitor's little green lights flickered steadily. Its battery is never loose anymore. I check it every night.
Down the hall, my son was asleep in his own bed, with his dinosaur blanket kicked off and both arms flung wide, finally resting.
May you like
I leaned over the crib and touched my daughter's cheek. She stirred, turned toward my hand, and sighed.
"It's okay, Junie," I whispered. "I'm awake."
