Her mouth turns up, and then she giggles. Have I ever heard Sadie laugh? I don’t think I have. It makes her whole face light up.
I hum to myself. “How would a cat vanish from an apartment like this?” I glance around. “Did you search the closets?”
Her eyes roam over the closets in my bedroom. “All the doors were shut when I came back; it was the first thing I checked,” she says. “I was sure it would be hiding somewhere.”
“I read something once about a woman who trained her cat to open doors, or perhaps it was a TikTok video, but anyway, maybe it got in somewhere and got trapped,” I say.
Sadie catches her lower lip in her teeth. “You don’t want to know how many videos I’ve watched of cats opening doors. But …” Her lips transform into another shy grin. “There were none of cats closing doors behind them.”
As I take in the closed closet doors, something hot and sharp ignites in my chest. It’s something I haven’t felt in a long time—a kind of warmth and solidness. Sadie’s dry offbeat humor is uncannily like mine. She’s been so quiet since she started at Williams Security, and I’m so fucking pleased we’ve got a cat to talk about.
No, James. No.You are not pleased you’ve got a cat.You’ve taken over leading the tech team, and you’ll be taking over the running of a company with fifty staff in a couple of months; you do not need a traumatized animal that eats its own fur along with everything else.
I’m pulling the last of the stuff out from under the bed when theapartment buzzer goes, and Sadie raises her eyebrows at me and then disappears.
“Sadie,” Darius’s voice booms from the intercom, “is James there? There’s a cat in the lobby that looks a lot like the one that was delivered to him this morning.”
“What?How did it get down there?” I say as I head over to her.
“Hey, James,” Darius says. “It’s just appeared. Do you want to come and collect it?”
“We’re on our way,” I say as I turn to Sadie. “I think we have our answer.”
She glances around. “Yes, but how did it get out?”
“We’re going to have to investigate that after we’ve rescued it from the lobby,” I say.
“Like a couple of sleuths.” She grins.
We’re riding down in the elevator with the cat carrier when she turns to me and says, “You know we can’t keep calling itthe cat.”
“There was no name on the paperwork, I checked. Do we really have to give it a name? It’s going back to the shelter tomorrow.”
Her teeth sink into her rosy bottom lip. “Now you’ve told me it’s been shut in a cage for months on end, I don’t know if I can send him or her back.”
Goddamn Des and his crazy-ass ideas. “I think I hate Des.”
She blinks at me wide-eyed. “Oh no! Don’t keep it just because I said …”
“Oh, don’t worry, Sadie. I feel the same way about the stupid cat.” I glower up at the steel roof of the elevator. “Fucking hell, we can’t return it to purgatory, can we?”
She laughs again, and when I glance at her warm, smiling face, something inside me lifts as I start laughing, too. “We’re just as bad as each other, aren’t we?”
She nods through her giggles. I stare at the panel for a couple of seconds. Perhaps we both need the cat. She has a bruise on her face, and I’m not in the best frame of mind. An animal would be … well … something. Something for us to focus on. I’ve certainly not worried about work or thought about Jane since I came home, have I?
We had a dog for most of my childhood and teens in my mom and dad’swarm rambling old house in Philly. When Soldier died, we were all so devastated that we couldn’t face getting another one. Sometimes I can still feel his wet nose pushing into my hand when I’m down or tired. I curl my fingers into my palm. When I was upset, I would bury my face in his fur and breathe him in. Even when arthritis stopped him from moving so much, he would stagger to his feet, his tail a slow, swooping wag, and limp his way across the living-room floor to where I was sitting on the couch.
“If you’d been locked in a cage for two months, maybe you’d take any chance of escaping you could get,” Sadie mutters.
“I can see that, to be honest.”
“We need a litter tray and cat food,” she adds.
I glance at my watch: 8 p.m. But this is New York. There’ll be a 24-hour pet store within five blocks. But when I take my phone out and search, we’re not in luck. All the local stores are shut. I find one I can go to in the morning that’s one street over, but that’s it.
“Since we’re downstairs, let’s go to the bodega. We’ll put the cat in the carrier first, leave him or her with Darius, and head out,” I say, and Sadie nods.
But when we reach the lobby, the cat is very dusty and disgruntled and has squashed itself into a corner behind a chair. Every time we approach it, it flattens its ears and hisses, lashing out, claws unsheathed.
