TWENTY-SIX
He’d almost said no. The house was wrong without Hank—too quiet, too still, Mabel pacing the rooms looking for her brother with a patience that made Kieran’s chest ache.
He spent the day putting up more flyers, calling the shelter again, refreshing the Nextdoor post until the comments blurred together.
Sending prayers! Have you tried leaving a dirty shirt outside? My cousin’s dog came back after twenty-two days!
Twenty-two days. He couldn’t think about twenty-two days.
But Devon hadn’t been asking. Devon’s invitations were like her coffee—delivered with the assumption you’d accept, and mild disappointment in your character if you didn’t.
So here he was. Wine in hand. A cat on his lap.
The cat, a massive orange tabby, had materialized the moment Kieran sat down. No greeting or tentative sniffing. Just twelve pounds of fur launching itself onto his thighs like a cannonball with a purr.
“Pickles,” Patti said from the stove. “He likes men more than we do.”
Pickles kneaded Kieran’s thigh twice, claws finding the exact gap between muscle and bone that would cause maximum discomfort, then settled into a vibrating loaf.
Devon and Patti’s house was small and cluttered with clear intention, bookshelves everywhere, mismatched mugs, a collection of succulents on the windowsill that ranged from thriving to suspicious. The kitchen smelled like coconut and ginger and possibly a forest floor.
A second cat appeared on the chair beside him. Smaller. Gray. A face that suggested she’d been personally wronged by the universe and was keeping a list.
“Juniper,” Devon said, not looking up.
Juniper did not blink. Juniper did not move. Juniper stared at Kieran with the flat, unblinking intensity of a parole officer.
“She’ll do that all night,” Patti said. “We’ve stopped questioning it.”
“Where’s Kazax?” Devon asked the room.
Patti glanced at the ceiling. “Plotting.”
She set the bowl in front of him. It was golden. It was steaming. It had something green floating on top that might have been a garnish or might have been a small plant that had fallen in by accident.
“It’s a golden turmeric soup,” Patti said. “With fermented cashew cream, pickled radish, and ashwagandha.”
“What’s ashwagandha?” Kieran asked.
“It’s an adaptogen,” Patti said. “It reduces cortisol.”
Kieran looked at the bowl. “In the soup.”
“In the soup.”
Devon leaned toward Kieran. “Just eat it,” she said quietly. “It’s incredible. I can’t explain it either.”
Kieran took a bite. It was, against every reasonable expectation, one of the best things he’d ever eaten. The turmeric was warm without being aggressive, the coconut cream was rich, and whatever the fermented cashew situation was doing, it was working.
“This is amazing,” he said.
“She won’t tell you how she does it,” Devon said. “I’ve been asking for two years.”
“The secret is patience,” Patti said.
“The secret is witchcraft,” Devon said. “She mutters to it while it’s on the stove. I’ve heard her.”
Patti didn’t look up. “I was checking the consistency.”
“You were talking to soup, Patti.”
They ate. Patti talked about her work at the botanical garden, where she’d been fighting a losing battle against an invasive species of snail for seven months.
“They’re organized,” Patti said grimly. “I’m not kidding. They move in formation.”
“She’s going to come home one day and tell me the snails have taken a hostage,” Devon said.
“They’ve already taken the hydrangeas! It’s only a matter of time.”
Devon talked about FOAM, about a regular who tried to tip in cryptocurrency, which Devon refused to acknowledge as real money. A new espresso machine that arrived broken. The college kid she hired who kept calling her “ma’am” until she threatened to schedule him exclusively for Sunday opens.
Kieran laughed, the kind that surprised him, deep and sudden in his stomach.
“How’s Rory doing?” Patti asked, the way you’d ask about the weather.
Kieran turned his spoon. “Good. He’s good. We’re…figuring things out.”
Devon looked at him over her wine glass but didn’t push.
“Figuring things out is literally all we’ve done for five years,” Devon said. “We’re still figuring out whose turn it is to take the bins out.”
“It’s your turn,” Patti said.
“It’s been my turn since 2021,” Devon said. “The system is broken.”
Pickles had relocated to the floor during dinner but was now pressing his entire body against Kieran’s ankle with a devotion that bordered on religious.
Juniper hadn’t moved. She was still staring.
Somewhere deeper in the house, a heavy object fell over.
“Kazax,” Devon and Patti said in unison, without turning around.
After dinner, they moved to the couch. Devon opened a second bottle. Patti curled into the corner with her legs tucked under her, and Kieran took the other end, which Pickles immediately reclaimed, landing on his lap with a thud that suggested the cat had been practicing.
Devon sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against Patti’s legs, wine glass balanced on her knee.
Patti reached over to the speaker on the shelf and put on an album—acoustic, a woman’s voice over a quiet guitar.
It filled the room the way good music does, not demanding attention, but still changing the air.
They weren’t talking to him, exactly. They were talking to each other, around each other, the way couples do when they’ve been together long enough that a guest in the room doesn’t change the frequency.
“Remember when you killed Gretchen?” Devon said.
“I didn’t kill Gretchen. The temperature fluctuated.”
“You left her on the porch overnight in January. She died.”
“Who’s Gretchen?” Kieran asked nervously.
“Sourdough starter,” Devon said. “She named her sourdough starter Gretchen. Fed her every day. Talked to her. Introduced her to guests.”
“Gretchen was a good starter,” Patti said quietly.
“Gretchen smelled like vinegar and sadness.”
“She smelled like fermentation, which is natural.”
“She died. And don’t get me started on the Great Kimchi Incident,” Devon said.
“Oh god,” Patti said, rolling her eyes.
“She brought homemade kimchi to a potluck,” Devon told Kieran. “Opened the jar and cleared half the room.”
“It was potent,” Patti said.
“A grown man left the house, Patti. He took his plate with him.”
“It was probiotic,” Patti said.
“It was a biohazard.”
Patti was trying not to laugh. Devon wasn’t trying at all.
Something landed on Kieran’s head.
He froze.
Heavy. Purring. Claws.
A calico cat had draped herself across the top of his head like a beret, her body covering his entire crown, front paws dangling over his forehead. She began kneading immediately. “Oh!”
“Don’t. Move,” Devon said.
“She’s making biscuits,” Patti said. “It’s an honor.”
“It’s painful!” Kieran hollered.
“It’s an honor that’s painful,” Devon clarified. “Like a Purple Heart.”
Kazax kneaded harder. Her purring vibrated through Kieran’s entire skull. Individual claws rearranged his hair into a design that was going to require an explanation later.
“How long does she—”
“Don’t move her,” they said simultaneously.
Kieran sipped his glass. Kazax purred against him. The room was warm and still.
The album shifted to a new track. A slower, sadder ballad. Patti went quiet for a second, her fingers resting on the back of Devon’s neck.
“This was the album,” Patti said, almost to herself.
Devon tilted her head back against Patti’s knee. “Yeah.”
Kieran didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. The way they both went still told him it meant something.
“I almost left,” Patti said. She wasn’t looking at Kieran.
She was looking at her wine. “About four months in. We’d had this awful fight…
I don’t even remember what it was about anymore.
Something stupid. But it felt enormous at the time, and I was so sure that it meant we were broken. That I’d gotten it wrong.”
Kazax shifted on his head. One paw slid down and covered Kieran’s left eye. He gently moved it. She put it back.
“So I bought a concert ticket,” Patti continued. “To a show in Portland. On Devon’s birthday. For one.”
Devon didn’t say anything. Her hand had found Patti’s ankle.
“I packed a bag. A small bag. And I put it in the car.” She paused. “For a long time. I just sat there with the engine off, listening to this album, and I thought—what am I driving away from? Because the thing I was mad about, I couldn’t even name it anymore. And the thing I’d be leaving was…”
She looked at Devon.
“Everything,” Patti said. “It was everything.”
Devon squeezed her ankle.
“I came back inside,” Patti said. “And she was sitting at the kitchen table, and she didn’t ask where I’d been. She—”
“I made tea,” Devon said.
“She made tea.” Patti smiled. “And that was it. We just…kept going.”
The song played. Nobody spoke for a while.
Then Kazax sneezed directly into Kieran’s hair.
“Oh my GOD!” Kieran barked.
Devon lost it. Patti covered her mouth.
Kieran sat with a cat on his head and a cat on his lap and the quiet weight of a story that wasn’t his and still somehow belonged to him. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
He stayed later than he meant to. Patti made tea when Devon switched to water, and the conversation loosened into the kind of shapeless, easy talk that only happened late at night between people who’d stopped trying to be interesting.
Kazax had finally abandoned his head and was now curled in the exact center of the kitchen table, asleep, as if she’d won something. Pickles had migrated from Kieran’s lap to his feet to the small of his back when he leaned forward, and was now draped across his shoulders like a twelve-pound scarf.
Juniper had not moved. Juniper might have been taxidermy. There was genuinely no way to tell.
At the door, Devon hugged him with both arms, firm and careful, the hug saying what she wasn’t going to risk saying out loud.
“You’re going to find him,” she said when she pulled back. “Hank. He’s out there.”
Kieran nodded. His throat was tight.
Patti appeared behind Devon with a container of leftover soup and a small bag. “For Mabel,” she said. “Some treats. For when she needs a pick-me-up.”
Kieran took the bag. “Thank you,” he said.
He drove home with the windows down. The night air smelled like salt and eucalyptus and blooming jasmine.
His hair was destroyed—Kazax had worked it into something he could only describe as post-apocalyptic.
There was a tuft standing straight up on one side that he couldn’t flatten no matter how many times he pressed it down at red lights.
When he pulled into the driveway, Rory’s porch light was on.
Kieran sat in his car, looking at it.
Then he texted:
KIERAN: Just got back from Devon and Patti’s. I have a cat’s worth of hair damage and leftover soup.
Three dots.
RORY NEIGHBOR: I have questions about the first part of that sentence
KIERAN: Long story.
RORY NEIGHBOR: Come over. Bring the soup.
Kieran looked at the text. At the porch light. At Rory’s front door, twenty feet from his own.
He grabbed the soup and went.