“Whatever they need. Supply runs. Cleaning cages. Transport to the vet. Sometimes bottle-feeding, when they’re short-staffed.”
“For six months,” I said again, because I needed to hear it a second time before it would sit still in my mind.
He nodded.
“And you never thought, even once, to mention it to me?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, a habit I’d watched him fall into and out of for thirty-one years, always a sign he was about to say something he’d rather not. “At first I didn’t think it mattered enough to bring up.”
“And later?”
His hand dropped to his side. “Later it started to feel strange that I hadn’t.”
I looked around the transformed room again — the bottles, the scale, the careful little nest of towels — and then back at him. “You are bottle-feeding a kitten named Susan at two in the morning, wrapped in our son’s baby blanket, and you didn’t think that was worth mentioning.”
