I say it from the kitchen, where I am washing a plate that was already clean, because my hands needed a job and the plate volunteered.
They come in quietly, but everything happens at once. The door leans against the wall, the bags go down. And then four large men are standing in my living room not asking me anything. They’re just looking around like they can find evidence of something. Something that I’m going to pretend didn’t happen like my life depends on it.
Then the looking stops, because they’ve found something.
My couch.
Where Muffin sits in the exact center of the pull-out, tail wrapped around his feet, staring right back at all of them. He does not get up.
“Since when do you have a cat?” Gunnar says.
“She doesn’t have a cat,” Erik says, with the full authority of three years and a shared wall. He is looking directly at a cat.
“I do now. His name is Muffin. He showed up this morning. He lives here now, and before anybody starts — he answers to it. We checked.”
“Muffin,” Gunnar says.
“Muffin.”
Erik just keeps staring at him. Rayner crouches down and offers the back of his hand, and Muffin sniffs it once and then ignores him with tremendous dignity, and this appears to delight Rayner completely.
Then their eyes start drifting from the cat back to me, and I know exactly what’s waiting behind that.
Erik’s eyes go around the room once. Then stop on the vacuum, still parked in the doorway, which I should have moved and did not, because apparently I wanted a witness.
“Ella—”
“Door first.” I don’t look up from the plate. “Please.”
Erik looks at me a second longer than I’d like. Then he nods, and the room turns into a job site.
They do.
If they know, they’ll make it a thing. If it’s a thing, I’ll have to talk about it. If I talk about it, either my voice is going to do something embarrassing or I am. Probably me. And I have already met my quota of embarrassing for today, and it’s not even lunch.
So it’s not a thing.
Muffin follows me back into the kitchen and sits on my foot. All of him, dead center, like he won’t leave me alone. Maybe he can’t.
“You didn’t have to do that earlier,” I tell him. Barely a whisper. Whispers are private. “But thank you.”
Behind me, the living room goes very quiet for a second.
My heart starts pounding before I can stop it.
There’s no way they…
Probably a tool thing.
Yep, definitely a tool thing.
The door goes up fast. Alarmingly fast. Rayner holds it in place with one hand while Erik sets the hinges, and Brock feeds them hardware in the right order without being asked, and there’s a rhythm to it that no group of old friends has ever had in the history of old friends, and I am too tired to really think about that, so I don’t.
The deadbolt comes out of the bag and it is not a normal deadbolt. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect on a vault.
“That’s a lot of lock,” I say.
“It’s rated for pawn shops,” Gunnar says, with real pride.
