What the Cat Knows

The HDMI cable lay severed between them, a black rubber snake—casualty of an argument about nothing. Maya sat on the edge of the couch, her iPhone screen glowing with a text she couldn't bring herself to answer. *You coming over?* from Julie. The question that used to be routine now felt like a test she'd already failed.

A bear of a man—that's what Julie's brother called him, standing there in the doorway last night with his shoulders taking up the frame, like he could block out everything else if he tried. The memory made Maya's stomach turn. Not because he was frightening, but because she'd almost said yes. Almost let herself be carried away by the sheer momentum of someone wanting her.

The cat, Lucifer, hopped onto the coffee table and regarded her with yellow eyes that seemed to hold ancient judgment. He'd witnessed everything: the tears, the wine-stained nights, the phone calls that ended in silence. Lucifer knew what she refused to articulate—that her loneliness had become a kind of armor, comfortable in its misery.

"You're a terrible friend," she whispered to the cat, but the words dissolved in the empty room.

Outside, Seattle rain streaked the windows like tears she hadn't cried. Three years with Rachel, gone like that—a clipped cable, a connection severed. Rachel's laugh still echoed in these walls, in the way light hit the kitchen linoleum at 7 PM, in Lucifer's insistence on sleeping on what used to be her side of the bed.

Her iPhone chimed again. *I'm worried about you.*

Maya's thumb hovered over the screen. The truth was, she wasn't coming back. She'd become someone else in the aftermath—not someone better or worse, just different. Like a house after a fire: the structure remained, but everything inside had transformed.

She typed: *I'm fine.* Then deleted it. Typed: *Need some time.* Deleted that too.

The bear from the wall-mounted taxidermy shop across the street seemed to watch through the window, its glass eyes reflecting Maya's own hollow expression back at her. Some things were preserved forever, frozen. Others simply rotted.

Lucifer curled into a circle, confident in his feline understanding that all endings were also beginnings, given enough time. Maya envied him that certainty.

She stood, picked up the broken cable, and dropped it into the trash. Then she typed the only thing that felt true: *I'm still here. I think.*