Chapter 1 - Three Empty Days
Day one without Sable is manageable.
I feed his bowl anyway. Old habit. The wet food sits in its little ceramic dish. Salmon, his favourite. I tell myself he'll be back before it spoils. I don't throw it away until the smell makes the decision for me. That's fine. That's normal, right? Cats disappear. It's one of the things they do. Disappear. Come back. Sleep wherever they please. That was just Sable.
He'll be back.
Day two.
I move through the house like I always do. Through the corridor, kitchen and living room. I count each empty room. He isn't in any of them. I check the cardboard box by the living room. His box, the one I've refused to throw out since he claimed it a year ago with the quiet authority of something that has never once doubted its right to exist. Empty. I check it again an hour later. Still empty. I don't know what I expected.
I check it seven more times before midnight.
Day three.
I stop filling the bowl. I'm not exactly sure when I decided to stop doing that or if I did that at all. It's possible my body simply knew before I did and acted accordingly, the way it does sometimes, like the way it stepped into the rain before I told it to. One moment the bowl was full. The next it was clean and dry on the mat and I was standing in the kitchen doorway looking at it like it was a thing in a museum. Something behind the glass. Something you look in awe at but don't touch.
It isn't hope exactly. Hope is too bright, too insistent. Hope leans forward.
What I'm doing is more like maintenance. You keep performing the same gestures until the gestures stop making sense and then you quietly retire them. You find something else to do with your hands.
I find something else to do with my hands.
I sit with my knees pulled up on the front window seat and quietly watch the street below hold its breath in the January fog. Cars pass. People pass. A dog on a lead pulls its owner across the wet pavement with cheerful, oblivious violence. I watch until they're gone and the street resumes to nothing.
He always comes back.
He always comes back.
He always -
I should eat something.
I don't eat something.
I go back to the same old window and sit with my chin on my knees. I watch the day go by, do nothing and I am fine. I am perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with me that wasn't wrong with me before. This is just a room. Those are just windows. That is just a street. I am just a woman sitting in her house, alone, waiting for her cat, which is perfectly normal thing to do, and I am fine.
The sky does its slow trick, the grey, then blue, then nothing and suddenly the streetlamps flick on and I've been sitting in the dark without noticing. I don't turn the lights on. The dark suits the house tonight. The house suits me. We have always had this simple understanding, this house and I. It holds its shape and I hold mine and neither of us asks too much of the other.
My phone reads 21:41. I set it face down, like a card you accept out of politeness and not too interested in reading.
22:00.
Tea. I make it. I don't drink it. It goes cold on the nightstand next to the mug from yesterday. I should wash those up. I make a mental note. I've always made mental notes and I've always ignored them. There is a certain comfort in the consistency of that. Pain is supposed to reshape you. But here I am, the same person I was three days ago. I haven't changed at all.
22:33.
I try to read the same paragraph three times. Four times. Five times. Six times. Something about a man? A field? A garden? I can't make it cohere. I put the book down with its spine cracked open and stare at the ceiling until the feeling dissolves.
Sable used to sit on my chest when I read. The weight of him. The inconvenient purring, kneading weight of him settling directly onto whatever page I was on with the absolute conviction that this was the correct place to be. He made reading impossible. I complained about it every time. Every single damn time I lifted him, set him aside, watched him immediately return. He always did.
I would like, very much so, for him to make reading impossible right now.
I continue to stare at the ceiling.
The ceiling offers nothing.
Sleep takes me without asking without warning like on bad nights. It doesn't happen slowly. Then I'm back again and it's 23:08. Something in my chest is moving. Not beating. Moving. A slow shift, like furniture quietly dragged across floorboards somewhere below. Nothing you can see, nothing you can point to, but the sound of it travels up through the soles of your feet and then you know.
I sit up.
Feet. Floor. The long corridor walk unreeling in the dark, the familiar doors passing on either side like a procession I've walked in a hundred times without ever learning the route. The clock ticks over to 23:11.
The doorbell rings.
I am already standing behind the front door when it rings.
My hand finds the latch.
I open the door.
The street is barely visible. Fog and dark pressing in. The street lamps are doing almost nothing, each one haloed and drowned in its own light.
The road is wet and black and reflects nothing back, just long smeared suggestions of light that don't quite resolve into shapes. The houses opposite are gone. Not dark, gone. The fog has taken them back, and leaving only the faint geometry of the roof lines and the ghosts of parked cars.
Nobody is there.
Of course no one is here. It's 23:11 on a Wednesday in the middle of January and the world outside my door has dissolved into fog and cold and the rain is so fine it barely can be called rain at all. Just a presence against the skin. Nobody is there.
The fog shifts slightly.
A box
A box is on the step.
