What the Cat Knew

The cat sat on the windowsill, golden eyes fixed on me like it knew something I hadn't yet admitted to myself. I'd been feeding it for three weeks—since Marcus moved out—and still it wouldn't come inside, just watched from the threshold like a judgment I couldn't quite shake.

My palm hovered over the screen of the iPhone, Marcus's last message glowing in the darkness: *I think we need different things.* The coward's punctuation mark. Three months of relationship dissolved into bureaucratic vagueness. I'd stared at those words until they lost meaning, until the letters became just shapes on glass.

Outside, the palm tree fronds whispered against the window. Same tree where Marcus had pressed me against the rough bark that first night, drunk on expensive tequila and the novelty of each other. He'd traced the life line on my palm with practiced confidence—though now I wondered if he'd actually known anything about palmistry, or if it had been just another line.

"You're full of shit," I said aloud to the empty room. The cat's tail twitched.

The real bull hadn't been the fights about money or his therapy-speak deflections. It was that I'd known from the start—known he was still in love with his ex, known I was just a way to avoid being alone, known I was accepting less than I deserved because the alternative was another Saturday night with my own thoughts.

The cat finally stood, stretched, and jumped down from the sill. It walked to the door and looked back at me, waiting.

I deleted Marcus's message. Then I blocked him. Then I turned off the phone entirely and set it on the counter like something that no longer belonged to me.

The bull by the horns, finally.

When I opened the door, the cat didn't run. It stepped inside like it had been waiting for me to make space all along.