The Cat Who Knew Everything

Marlena's cat, Barnaby, watched from the windowsill as the man in the gray baseball cap returned to the bench across the street. He'd been coming every Tuesday for three weeks, always sitting there from 2 to 4 PM, never doing anything but occasionally tossing a baseball into the air and catching it.

Marlena had been watching him too. Not because she was a spy—she was just a woman who'd been widowed for eighteen months, whose days stretched like taffy until they thinned enough to break. But there was something about the way the man touched his hair, pushing a stray lock behind his left ear, that made her chest ache with familiarity.

The hair. That gesture.

Her husband had done that exact thing when he was nervous. James had been a intelligence analyst, not a field operative, but he'd carried himself like someone carrying secrets. He'd died in his sleep, heart failure at fifty-two. The doctors said it was peaceful. Marlena still felt like she'd been pickpocketed of her future.

She should have gone across the street. Said something. Anything. But what if she was wrong? What if she was just a lonely woman projecting meaning onto a stranger because her cat gave her judgmental looks when she spent entire days without speaking to another living soul?

Barnaby meowed, tail flicking.

"You're right," she said aloud. "This is ridiculous."

She grabbed her coat, walked down three flights of stairs, and crossed the street. The man looked up as she approached, baseball paused mid-air. He had kind eyes, crinkled at the corners, and something about his jawline—

"Marlena?" The baseball dropped from his hand.

She stopped. "Do I know you?"

He stood, hesitated, then touched his hair—pushed a stray lock behind his left ear. "David Miller. James and I worked together. At the Agency. He talked about you constantly."

He smiled, something tentative and hopeful. "I'm so sorry for your loss. He was my best friend."

Her heart hammered against her ribs. "Why are you here?"

"James asked me to check on you. If anything ever happened to him." David's voice broke. "I'm supposed to make sure you're okay. But I kept chickening out."

Barnaby appeared at the window, watching them.

"Well," she said, suddenly exhausted and energized all at once, "you might as well sit back down. Tell me about the James I never knew."

David sat. Picked up his baseball. "He saved my life once. Did he tell you that?"

"No," she whispered. "He never did."

The baseball arced against the sky, caught on its descent, like grace returning to her hands at last.