Hazel Pov

I read the text three times before my brain caught up with my eyes.

Is this your cat?

Unknown number.

A photo attached.

Mimi, sitting on a grey couch that wasn't mine, in her pink collar, looking exactly as unbothered as she always did, like she hadn't just spent ten days giving me a minor cardiac event.

I was out of the apartment in under two minutes.

Five streets felt like five miles when I was running them in old sneakers and yesterday's hoodie, phone clutched in one hand, Mimi's carrier swinging from the other. I texted back as I ran, which was a hazard, and I didn't care.

I'm coming right now. Which building?

He sent me the address before I turned the corner.

The building was a low, clean looking block of apartments with a small courtyard out front. A man opened the door before I even knocked, which meant he'd been watching for me, which was either thoughtful or alarming, and I chose thoughtful because I needed Mimi back and could reassess later.

"Hazel?" He had an easy smile, dark eyes, curly hair, the kind of unhurried energy that made you feel like you weren't inconveniencing anyone.

"I'm Caleb. She's inside, she's fine."

And there she was.

Mimi. On his couch. Pressed against the armrest with her eyes half closed, looking for all the world like she'd simply decided to take an extended vacation and was mildly annoyed to see it ending.

I set the carrier down and crouched on the floor in front of her, and I am not ashamed to say my voice came out embarrassingly relieved.

"You absolute menace," I whispered. "I made twenty flyers."

Mimi blinked at me slowly. Entirely unmoved.

Caleb laughed, low and genuine, from somewhere behind me.

"She walked in about a week ago," he said, settling onto the arm of the opposite chair. "I have a cat, Cheeto, so the building's set up for it. I figured she was someone's house cat, she was way too comfortable with people to be feral, so I just let her stay until I found the post."

I looked around and spotted a second cat, round and orange, watching Mimi from the top of a bookshelf with dignified suspicion.

"Cheeto doesn't mind?"

"Cheeto minds everything," Caleb said. "That's just his face."

I laughed, which surprised me slightly, because I hadn't done that in ten days either.

"Thank you so much for taking care of Mimi, Caleb,"

He made tea while I coaxed Mimi into the carrier, which took longer than it should have and involved a negotiation I lost twice, and by the time she was latched in and calm, Caleb had set a mug on the coffee table like I'd been there before.

"You don't have t-" I started.

"You look like you've had a rough week," he said simply. "Five minutes."

He lived alone, he told me, had been in the neighborhood about eight months, worked in production which was the general answer everyone in this city gave when they didn't feel like explaining the full version.

He was easy to talk to in the way that some people just are, no effort, no performance, and I noticed, somewhere in the middle of it, that my shoulders had come down from around my ears for the first time since Mimi disappeared.

I left twenty minutes later with the carrier in one hand and his number in my phone under Caleb, the cat man because he'd asked me to let him know she settled back in okay, and it was the reasonable, neighborly thing to do.

The walk back felt lighter than the walk there.

I got home, got Mimi into my room, closed the door, and sat down on the floor with my back against the bed while she stalked a slow, suspicious lap of the room before apparently deciding it still met her standards and settling into her spot at the foot of the mattress.

I exhaled so slowly it felt like something leaving my body.

"Welcome home," I said. "Don't ever do that again."

She looked at me once, blinked, meowed softly and closed her eyes.

I was still sitting on the floor when I heard the front door.

Rowan.

Home earlier than I expected, which meant I hadn't had time to prepare for sharing the same air as him again, which I had started resenting, because I had been perfectly fine for the last hour and a half and I would have liked to stay that way a little longer.

I heard him drop his keys. The familiar sound of Coco's greeting, nails on hardwood, the small scramble of a dog who treated every return like a reunion after years apart.

And then nothing for a moment.

Then Rowan's voice, different from his usual register, tight in a way I'd only heard once before, in an alley at night.

"What happened to you?"

I opened my bedroom door.

Coco was in the living room, holding his back left leg slightly off the ground, not putting full weight on it. He wasn't crying, wasn't distressed, but the leg was wrong and I could see it from the doorway.

Rowan was crouched in front of him, running both hands carefully along the leg, jaw set.

He looked up at me.

The expression on his face wasn't something I'd seen from him before.

"What did you do to my dog?"

The words hit like cold water.

"Excuse me?"

"He was fine this morning." Rowan stood, slowly.

"I come home and he's limping. You were here. Nobody else was here."

"I didn't touch your dog."

"He didn't do this by himself, Hazel."

"Coco leaps." I kept my voice flat, because the alternative was something I didn't want to give him. "He jumps off furniture constantly. I've told you this hundred time that I've watched him throw himself off the couch twelve times this week like he's training for something. I didn't touch him."

"He had never done this in my previous apartment and you don't even like him."

"I don't dislike him. I dislike you. There's a difference

Something moved across his face, sharp and quick.

"I'm taking him to the vet."

"Good," I said. "Please, do that first."

He took Coco and left without another word, and I stood in the middle of the living room and breathed carefully for a minute before going back into my room.

He was gone for two hours.

I heard him come back. Heard Coco's careful, slightly muffled steps on the floor and I walked out of my room to see him only to find the dog's leg wrapped in a bandage.

Coco had a wrap on his left hind leg, neat and white. Rowan was holding the lead, and his expression had not softened in the two hours he'd been gone.

"Swollen muscle," he said. "Probably blunt impact."

Relief flickered through me for Coco, good that he didn't break his bone. But then I saw Rowan's accusing look on me.

"Or a dog who jumps off furniture," I told him narrowing my eyes at his stupid accusations.

"The vet said it could be either."

"Then you have your answer."

"I have a maybe." He looked at me steadily. "You should be glad I have no proof. Because if I find anything, I'm taking action."

Something inside me went very still.

"If you want to talk about taking action," I said, "we could start with my cat who spent ten days missing because you couldn't follow one rule about the front door. You want to threaten action over a maybe? Fine. So do I."

"That was an acciden-"

"So was whatever happened to Coco, if anything happened to Coco at all. Which it didn't. Because I didn't touch him."

Rowan looked at me for a long moment.

"Or maybe," he said, quiet and deliberate, "your cat ran away because it wanted to get away from someone like you."

The room went very still.

I heard what he was implying. The shape of it, the direction it was pointed.

"Get out of my doorway," I said.

"I'm putting a camera in the living room."

"Yes, go ahead."

"And from now on," he said, stepping back, "Coco stays in my room and off the shared space when I'm not home."

"Mimi stays in mine," I said. "We agree on something. Groundbreaking."

I closed the door, on his face.

I stood on the other side of it, heart going too fast, hands pressed flat against the wood, and waited until I heard his door close before I moved.

Mimi jumped off the bed and came to sit on my feet, which she only did when she wanted something or when she sensed I needed it, and I genuinely couldn't tell which one it was right now.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Caleb.

Did she settle back in okay?

I looked at the closed door. Thought about the camera box I could already hear being opened in the living room. Thought about the word he'd used. The direction it had been pointed.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and typed back.

More or less. It's a complicated household.

His reply came quickly.

If you ever need to escape a complicated household, Cheeto and I are five streets away.

I stared at that for a second longer than I should have.

Then, for the second time that evening, I laughed.