8. Cat
— ? —
Cat
The first motel smells like bleach and regret.
“Cash for a week,” I tell the clerk, sliding bills across the counter. “Maria Santos.”
He barely glances up from his phone. “Room 112. Ice machine’s broken. Don’t call about it.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
“Checkout’s eleven. You miss it, I charge another night.”
“Understood.”
He slides the key across without another word. Perfect. The kind of place where nobody asks questions because nobody wants to know the answers.
The room is small, single bed, scratchy comforter, television bolted to the dresser like someone might steal it. The bathroom has rust stains in the tub and a mirror cracked down the middle.
I drop my bag on the bed and sit, and the adrenaline that’s carried me since the garden wall finally drains away. My hands start shaking. Then my whole body.
Then I pull his flannel from my bag and press it against my face.
I hate myself for bringing it.
I wear it anyway.
Day 3
The nausea hits without warning.
One minute I’m watching morning news I don’t care about. The next I’m sprinting for the bathroom, barely making it before everything comes up.
Stress, I tell myself afterward, rinsing my mouth with tap water. Anxiety. Vending machine food and gas station coffee finally catching up with me.
I go back to bed and try not to think about anything at all.
Day 5
The pharmacy clerk eyes my basket, black hair dye, crackers, ginger tea.
“Rough week?” she asks.
“Something like that.”
“The ginger tea’s good for upset stomachs. My sister swears by it.”
“Thanks,” I say, mustering a smile that feels borrowed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You want a bag?”
“Please.”
She rings me up without further commentary, and I pay cash, same as everything else. No cards, no trail, no proof I was ever here.
Back in the motel bathroom, I mix the chemicals according to instructions, trying not to breathe in the fumes. My brown hair has always been my mother’s legacy, same shade, same waves, same stubborn cowlick at the temple.
I’m about to cover it in black.
Twenty-five minutes later, I rinse and look up.
A stranger stares back at me. Paler, sharper, like someone who’s been through something terrible and come out changed.
She doesn’t look like Caterina Romano-Moretti.
Good.
Day 7
I have to call Enzo.
I’ve been putting it off, but I know my brother. If I don’t check in soon, he’ll start making calls, and if he reaches the wrong people, everything falls apart.
Finally, I dial from memory, one of three numbers I know by heart, along with my parents’ landline and Max’s. I’m not thinking about the third one.
Two rings.
“Pronto.”
“Enzo. It’s me.”
“Cat! Finally. I’ve been calling your phone for three days. Where the hell are you?”
“Writing retreat. Very remote. The cell signal is basically decorative.”
“Writing retreat,” he repeats flatly. “You went on a writing retreat and forgot to tell anyone?”
“I told the house staff.”
I pace between the motel bed and the dresser, phone pressed hard to my ear, watching fog swallow the cars in the lot.
“You told them you were traveling. That’s not the same as ‘I’m disappearing into the wilderness to commune with my laptop.’”
“It’s not the wilderness. There’s running water. Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“The plumbing is eccentric. Very rustic. Very authentic.”
“Cat.” The teasing drops out of his voice, and I can hear him shifting into the tone he uses right before he starts solving a problem I haven’t admitted I have.
“What? You’re the one who said I should take my writing more seriously. I’m taking it seriously. I rented a cabin in the middle of nowhere to focus on the book.”
“And you couldn’t do that from home?”
“Have you met my home? There are seventeen people working there at any given moment. Someone’s always knocking on something.”
What I don’t say: that the seventeen people are Max’s, that every one of them reports to a man I’m not sure I can trust anymore, that the house stopped feeling like home the second I found the note.
“So you ran away to a cabin.”
“I strategically relocated to a creative workspace. Very different verb.”
I hear him exhale through his nose, the particular Enzo sound that means he’s deciding whether to push.
“Is it?”
“Yes. Running away implies I’m avoiding something. I’m embracing something. My art. My vision.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.”
“I’m a writer. Writers go on retreats. It’s practically a job requirement.”
I keep my voice light, breezy, the practiced patter of a woman with nothing to hide. My free hand presses flat against my stomach, trying to settle the nausea before it reaches my voice.
“Where exactly is this cabin?”
“Upstate. Mountains. Very picturesque when the fog lifts, which is approximately never.”
“Give me an address.”
My grip tightens on the phone. This is the part where I have to be careful, where one wrong detail turns into a set of coordinates.
“Why, so you can send a rescue party?”
“So I know where to find your body when you inevitably anger the local wildlife.”
“There’s no wildlife. Just trees. And one very aggressive squirrel.”
“Cat.” Just my name, the way he’s said it since we were kids and he caught me somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. Worried, now, under the exasperation.
“I’m fine, Enzo. Really. I just needed to get away and write. That’s all this is.”
“For how long?”
“A few weeks, maybe. However long it takes to finish this draft.”
The draft is real, at least. That part isn’t a lie. I’ve been writing like the pages are the only thing holding me upright, because most days they are.
“Mamma’s going to have a heart attack.”
“Tell her I’m working. She understands deadlines.”
“She left seven voicemails. The last one was mostly crying.”
“I’ll call her. Tonight, I promise.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Is the book any good?”
“Best thing I’ve written. Which is either true or the fog talking.”
“And you’ll call? Regularly?”
“Every few days. I promise.”
“If you go dark for more than three days, I’m sending someone to check on you.”
I hear the protectiveness under the threat and don’t fight it. It’s the closest thing to a hug I’m getting through a phone.
“That seems excessive.”
“That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
“Fine. Three days. I can work with that.”
“And a call with video on Sundays,” he says. “I need to see your face, Cat. If you look frightened, I come for you. I don’t care what you call the retreat.” I agree. I can choose a blank wall and make myself look rested for ten minutes. It will be another lie, but one he might believe.
“Good.” A pause. “I love you, sorellina. You know that, right?”
My throat tightens. “I know. I love you too.”
“Call Mamma.”
“I said I would.”
“You also said the plumbing was authentic.”
“Tonight, Enzo. I promise.”
I hang up before my voice can crack.
Day 12
The nausea isn’t getting better.
Every morning, like clockwork, I’m hunched over the toilet bringing up nothing. Crackers don’t help. Ginger tea doesn’t help. Nothing helps.
I tell myself it’s stress. The body’s response to weeks of fear.
I tell myself it’s not what I’m starting to suspect.
Day 15
His number hovers behind my teeth every night.
I memorized it in month two of the marriage, he made me repeat it until I could say it without thinking. “Always have a way to reach me,” he’d said.
Now I know better.
But still. Every night, in the dark, wrapped in flannel that’s losing his scent, I think about calling. Just to hear his voice. Just to know if any of it was real.
I never dial.
3 a.m., Day 16
The motel room is too quiet.
I’m wrapped in his flannel again. I’ve worn it every night since I left, pathetic as that is, and sleep won’t come. The scratchy comforter isn’t warm enough. The pillow smells like industrial detergent instead of sandalwood and him.
My mind keeps circling back to the warm months. Before the freeze. Before the study door started staying locked.
I remember the night he brought me tea when I was sick, “Feel better, Caterina”, setting the tray down like an offering, remembering exactly how I took my Earl Grey without ever asking.
Every tender moment from those January weeks replays on a loop, and my runaway mind keeps rewriting the narrative. What if the tea was reconnaissance? What if the chess games were just a way to study my patterns, learn my tells? What if every laugh was cataloged for later use?
I try the opposite reading too, that he was only a man learning to be kind until his father died and grief ate him alive, and I can’t make it hold. It doesn’t explain the meeting. It doesn’t explain the words.
I don’t know if I love her enough to keep her as my wife.
I can’t stand this much longer.
But then I remember the night I told him about Nonna’s farm. Sprawled on his study rug after our longest match, both of us loose with whiskey and the late hour.
“Tell me something real,” he’d said. “Something you don’t tell people.”
And I had. The lemon trees, the pizza oven, the crooked pantry door. All of it spilling out because he asked like he actually wanted to know.
“She sounds remarkable.”
“She died when I was seventeen. The farm just sat there after.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s just a building.”
“We both know that’s not true. It’s where you were happy.” His hand found mine in the dark. “That’s a foundation.”
He held on. That’s the part that haunts me. He held on like he meant it.
Did he mean it? Was any of it real?
The note says no. The meeting says no. But my hands still remember the warmth of his, and my stupid heart keeps asking what if.
What if I’d stayed? What if I’d confronted him instead of running?
What if he’d explained?
But explanations don’t erase what I heard. Don’t erase the note in my bag. Don’t change the fact that somewhere in that house, my husband was plotting my disappearance while I fell asleep in his arms.
I curl tighter into the flannel and count the hours until morning.
Day 18
The pharmacy is fluorescent-bright and merciless.
“Just this,” I tell the cashier, setting the pregnancy test on the counter.
“You need a bag?”
“Please.”
She doesn’t look at my face, doesn’t comment, just rings me up and hands over the brown paper bag like it contains nothing important.
“Have a good day,” she says.
“Thanks.”
The bathroom floor is cold.
I’m sitting with my back against the door, the test balanced on the sink. Instructions said three minutes.
It’s been two.
If it’s negative, I keep running. Keep hiding. Keep pretending this is temporary.
If it’s positive…
The timer goes off.
Two pink lines, clear and unmistakable.
The sound that comes out of me isn’t a sob, isn’t a laugh, something between, some animal noise of shock.
Pregnant.
With the child of a man who wants me dead. Who told his entire organization he couldn’t stand being married to me.
A night weeks before the meeting. The freeze cracking just enough for him to reach for me, desperate, wordless, gone by morning.
The freeze had that one language. And now the math points back to that night.
I could go back. Tell him. Maybe the baby would change things.
But the note echoes: She won’t be with us much longer.
Would a baby change that? Or just be another problem to solve?
I press my palm flat against my stomach.
This baby comes first.
Before Max, before the marriage, before anything. This baby is innocent.
He doesn’t get to know. Not while that note sits in my bag, not while I have no idea what he’s capable of.
If it’s ever safe, I’ll tell him myself. On my terms.
Until then, I disappear better than anyone he’s ever hunted.
I’m a Romano. We survive. We protect our own.
I look at the black-haired stranger in the cracked mirror.
“Okay,” I say, one hand on my stomach. “We can do this.”
She doesn’t look convinced.
She nods anyway.