Hazel Pov

I didn't storm out.

I want that on record. I walked out of my room calmly, which was the dignified thing to do, and I crossed my own living room with the measured composure of someone who had a very reasonable point to make and intended to make it clearly.

The apartment was full of people I didn't know, holding drinks I didn't buy, standing in a space I cleaned every Sunday without fail.

Music pulsed from a speaker someone had relocated from Rowan's room to my kitchen counter, which was not a decision anyone had consulted me on.

Rowan was in the middle of it all, leaning against the wall with a drink in his hand, laughing at something, easy and loose and completely unbothered, looking every bit like someone who had never in his life given a single thought to quiet hours.

He saw me coming.

The smile didn't disappear exactly. It just shifted slightly, recalibrated, the way people's faces do when they're deciding whether to be charming or apologetic and land somewhere between the two.

"Hazel,"

"This is the fourth time," I said, keeping my voice even, because I am not a person who shouts.

"Fourth time I have had to remind you about the same rule. I have a deadline. I am a writer, and I need quiet to work. I asked you for one thing when you moved in. One."

"Okay she's not shouting but she might as well be," someone behind me muttered.

"Hey, relax." A girl with a short pixie cut and an amused expression appeared at Rowan's shoulder, tilting her head at me like I was a mildly interesting puzzle.

"We're not even being that loud."

"Or is the problem," another voice chimed in from the couch, "that the writer isn't getting paid enough? Or sleeping enough? Or-"

"Tasha." Rowan's voice went sharp for exactly one second.

The girl on the couch, Tasha apparently, pressed her lips together around a grin, entirely unrepentant.

They were laughing. Pulling my leg, probably the way they always did with each other, casual and easy, and I understood that on a logical level.

I was not in a logical place.

"Out," I said.

A beat of silence.

"Hey." Rowan stepped forward, lowering his voice like that would help.

"Hazel, come on. This is my apartment to-"

"Yes," I said. "And it's mine, too. When you moved in I told you the norms. You agreed to them. You cannot stand here and complain I didn't warn you."

He opened his mouth.

And then, from somewhere behind us, from the direction of my bedroom, came a sound that stopped the entire room cold.

A screech. High, furious, unmistakably Mimi.

Followed immediately by a crash. Then scrambling. Then Coco shot out of my bedroom like a small, fluffy cannonball, ears flat, tail between his legs, and Mimi came after him like a grey, hissing missile.

Someone screamed. Someone else lifted their feet off the floor instinctively. Coco hit the living room rug at full speed and Mimi didn't stop, didn't slow down, didn't look at anyone.

She hit the open front door and was gone.

The whole thing took about four seconds.

I was already moving.

The hallway was empty by the time I got there. I heard her before I saw her, the frantic clatter of paws on the stairwell, and I took the stairs two at a time in my pajamas, calling her name in the tone that had always worked before.

It did not work now.

The building door was propped open from Rowan's guests coming and going all evening, and by the time I reached the ground floor, Mimi was already outside and the street was dark and I couldn't see her anywhere.

Rowan appeared beside me a moment later, Coco tucked under one arm, breathing hard.

"There." He pointed to an alley between two buildings, just barely catching a flash of grey tail disappearing into the dark.

We ran. He caught Coco's collar before the dog could follow, and I kept going, calling Mimi's name into the alley, into the dark, into nothing.

She wasn't there.

I stood in the middle of the alley, arms wrapped around myself, and turned in a slow circle like she was going to materialize out of thin air if I looked hard enough. I felt scared for my cat. She had never been outside, and I looked around frantically, calling her name.

Rowan came to stand behind me, Coco now still and quiet under his arm, like even the dog understood the weight of the moment.

"We'll find her," he said.

"You don't follow a single house rule." I turned around and the composure I'd walked out of my room with was completely gone.

"Not one. The door was open because your guests kept coming in and you didn't think once to keep the dog in your room when you know they've been fighting for a month. One month, Rowan. Not one rule."

"I know." He said it quietly. No charm, no deflection. "I'm sorry. I'll find her, okay? Let me-"

"Don't." I took a step back. "Just don't."

"You literally feel like you are the only one in the house and I have been locking myself in my own room just to exist in peace," I said.

"In my own apartment. Do you understand how ridiculous that is?"

I walked back inside alone.

The party had gone quiet by the time I got upstairs.

Tasha was in the kitchen, tidying things that hadn't been tidied all evening, and she looked up when I walked in with an expression that had lost its earlier amusement entirely.

"Did you find her?"

I shook my head.

"She'll come back," the girl from the couch said from somewhere behind me, softer now, no laughter in it. "Cats always come back."

I walked into my room, closed the door, and locked it.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and stared at the empty spot at the foot of my mattress where Mimi slept every night without exception.

It's my fault.

The thought landed before I could stop it.

Why didn't I lock my room? I knew the door was open. I knew.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my glasses until the thought got quieter, which it did, eventually, the way thoughts do when you're too tired to keep having them.

"Where are you, Mimi?"

The week that followed was its own specific kind of awful.

I made flyers. Printed twenty of them at the coffee shop, taped them up within a three block radius of the building, posted on every neighborhood group and on my social media with a photo of Mimi sitting in a sunbeam looking imperious and beautiful and completely unbothered, the way she always looked.

Nobody called.

Rowan apologized on day one, properly, standing in the kitchen with his hands in his pockets and none of his usual ease about him. I heard him out and said nothing and went back to my room.

He tried again on day three. Left a coffee outside my door the way I liked it, which meant he'd been paying attention and I hated that it registered at all. I left it there until it went cold.

Day five he knocked and I said I was busy, which was true, and also a door I was not ready to open.

It wasn't that his apology wasn't real. It was that standing in that alley in the dark, calling Mimi's name into nothing, I had understood in a very clear, very quiet way exactly what it cost to share your life with someone who didn't take the same things seriously that you did.

I had known it would be like this. I had said yes anyway, because of rent, and this was what that looked like.

On day seven, at two in the morning, I woke up to the sound of the front door opening.

I lay still, listening, waiting for a party that didn't come.

Just quiet. The soft click of Coco's nails on the floor. Low murmuring, like someone talking to a dog.

Then silence again.

I rolled over and pulled the blanket up and told myself it was nothing. He'd been out. He'd come back. It wasn't my business.

The same thing happened on day eight. And day nine.

On day ten I gulped down two glasses of water out of anxiety in the morning and found Rowan's jacket on the hook by the door.

Dirty. Dusty, like he'd been in alleyways. His shoes on the mat, worn, the soles darker than they should have been.

I stood there in the kitchen, with the glass of water in my hand, and stared at his shoes for a long moment.

Then my phone lit up on the counter.

An unknown number. A text, four words long.

"Is this your cat?"

A/N

Hope she finds her cat