The Cat Who Knew Too Much

Miranda found the cat on her balcony every Tuesday—lean, gray-eyed, nursing a scar across its nose like a jagged parenthesis. She'd leave out tuna. The cat would eat, then vanish into the urban sprawl of Berlin like it had business elsewhere.

Which was fitting. So did Elena.

They'd met at the company summer party three years ago, both drunk by the pool, Elena's linen dress clinging to her thighs like second skin. "Pool's heated," she'd said, sinking in with practiced grace. Miranda followed, and somewhere between the artificial buoyancy and the real champagne, they'd become friends.

Not just coworkers who grabbed lunch. The kind of friend who holds your hair back when you're puking merlot into a toilet at 3 AM. Who knows you never called your mother back the week she died. Who texts you first on birthdays.

Now Elena sat across from Miranda in their favorite café, tracing the rim of her coffee cup. Outside, rain blurred the city into impressionism.

"I'm leaving," Elena said.

"The company?"

"Berlin."

Miranda's stomach hollowed. "To where?"

Elena's eyes slipped away. "Can't say."

It came out in fragments over the next hour. Not a new job. Not a romance. A six-year operation, corporate intelligence, stealing R&D from the pharmaceutical giant they both served. Elena was—had been—a spy.

"So the pool," Miranda said, her voice sounding like it belonged to someone else. "The summer party. That's when you started here?"

"Yes."

"And our friendship?"

Elena finally looked at her. "Not fake."

"But useful?"

Silence stretched between them like pulled taffy.

"Sometimes," Elena whispered.

Miranda thought of the cat—trust given cautiously, earned slowly, broken in an instant. She'd never see it again either.

"You should go," Miranda said.

Elena stood, then paused. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," said Miranda, though she was already calculating the fallout: HR interviews, lawyers, her own complicity in what Elena might have learned from pillow talk and late-night confessions. "At least you didn't fake the part where you needed something from me."

Elena flinched. She walked out into the rain without looking back.

At home, Miranda found the cat waiting. The tuna can was empty. The scar across its nose looked less like a wound now and more like a warning she should've heeded from the start.

She closed the balcony door. Locked it.

Some things, she decided, didn't deserve to be fed anymore.