Page 89 of We Are Just Us

Devon tilted her head back against Patti’s knee. “Yeah.”

Kieran didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. The way they both went still told him it meant something.

“I almost left,” Patti said. She wasn’t looking at Kieran. She was looking at her wine. “About four months in. We’d had this awful fight…I don’t even remember what it was about anymore. Something stupid. But it felt enormous at the time, and I was so sure that it meant we were broken. That I’d gotten it wrong.”

Kazax shifted on his head. One paw slid down and covered Kieran’s left eye. He gently moved it. She put it back.

“So I bought a concert ticket,” Patti continued. “To a show in Portland. On Devon’s birthday. For one.”

Devon didn’t say anything. Her hand had found Patti’s ankle.

“I packed a bag. A small bag. And I put it in the car.” She paused. “For a long time. I just sat there with the engine off, listening to this album, and I thought—what am I driving away from? Because the thing I was mad about, I couldn’t even name it anymore. And the thing I’d be leaving was…”

She looked at Devon.

“Everything,” Patti said. “It was everything.”

Devon squeezed her ankle.

“I came back inside,” Patti said. “And she was sitting at the kitchen table, and she didn’t ask where I’d been. She—”

“I made tea,” Devon said.

“She made tea.” Patti smiled. “And that was it. We just…kept going.”

The song played. Nobody spoke for a while.

Then Kazax sneezed directly into Kieran’s hair.

“Oh my GOD!” Kieran barked.

Devon lost it. Patti covered her mouth.

Kieran sat with a cat on his head and a cat on his lap and the quiet weight of a story that wasn’t his and still somehow belonged to him. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

He stayed later than he meant to. Patti made tea when Devon switched to water, and the conversation loosened into the kind of shapeless, easy talk that only happened late at night between people who’d stopped trying to be interesting.

Kazax had finally abandoned his head and was now curled in the exact center of the kitchen table, asleep, as if she’d won something. Pickles had migrated from Kieran’s lap to his feet to the small of his back when he leaned forward, and was now draped across his shoulders like a twelve-pound scarf.

Juniper had not moved. Juniper might have been taxidermy. There was genuinely no way to tell.

At the door, Devon hugged him with both arms, firm and careful, the hug saying what she wasn’t going to risk saying out loud.

“You’re going to find him,” she said when she pulled back. “Hank. He’s out there.”

Kieran nodded. His throat was tight.

Patti appeared behind Devon with a container of leftover soup and a small bag. “For Mabel,” she said. “Some treats. For when she needs a pick-me-up.”

Kieran took the bag. “Thank you,” he said.

He drove home with the windows down. The night air smelled like salt and eucalyptus and blooming jasmine. His hair was destroyed—Kazax had worked it into something he could only describe as post-apocalyptic. There was a tuft standing straight up on one side that he couldn’t flatten no matter how many times he pressed it down at red lights.

When he pulled into the driveway, Rory’s porch light was on.

Kieran sat in his car, looking at it.

Then he texted: