I felt something in my chest crack open with relief. Greg made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and sat back hard in the dirt with the second kitten cupped in both palms, his shoulders sagging like a man who had just set down something heavy.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, too quickly.
That single word bothered me more than anything else that had happened all night. But there would be time for that question later. Right now there were bigger ones. “Inside,” I said. “Now. All of us.”
PART THREE: Six Months of Silence
The guest room looked entirely different once I knew what I was looking at.
A small pet carrier sat against the wall, its door propped open. Beside it: bottles, tins of kitten formula, a digital kitchen scale, a stack of old towels gone soft from washing, a heating pad tucked beneath half a shallow cardboard box. And propped against the lamp, a printed sheet of feeding instructions with the letterhead of a local animal rescue at the top.
