What the Cat Saw

David ate papaya every morning with the same methodical precision. Fork into flesh, twist, scoop out seeds, repeat. Elena watched from across the kitchen table, her coffee growing cold, their wedding rings glinting in the fluorescent light like tiny accusations.

"The firm's sending me to Singapore again," David said, not looking up. "Three weeks this time."

"Again." It wasn't a question.

"It's a big account, El. You know how it is."

But Elena was thinking about the phone calls he took in the bathroom. The encrypted messages that lit up his screen at 2 AM. The way he'd started keeping his phone face down on the nightstand, like he was hiding something even in his sleep.

Their tabby cat, Mango, jumped onto the table and rubbed against David's arm. He didn't even notice. That was the thing about David lately—he noticed nothing. Not the distance growing between them like a tumor, not the way his own secrets had started smelling, not even how Mango had stopped sleeping on his pillow six months ago.

Cats knew. They always knew.

"You're leaving tomorrow?" Elena asked.

"Tonight. Red-eye."

He stood, rinsed his papaya bowl, and left without kissing her goodbye.

Hours later, after David's flight had departed and the apartment settled into that particular kind of silence that felt like a weight, Elena sat at his desk. She didn't know what she was looking for until she found it.

A background app on his laptop. Screen captures. Keyloggers. GPS tracking. Her entire digital life, catalogued and analyzed, going back eighteen months.

David wasn't having an affair. He was building a case.

Mango padded into the room and jumped onto the desk, staring at the screen with those knowing yellow eyes. Of course. The cat had watched David type his passwords in his sleep, had watched him install the spyware, had watched him monitor his own wife like she was a suspect in a crime she didn't know she'd committed.

Elena scratched Mango behind the ears, her hand trembling.

"You knew," she whispered. "You knew all along."

The cat purred, a sound like a tiny engine, relentless and indifferent. Outside, the first papaya of the season was rotting on the windowsill where David had left it, brown and soft and collapsing into itself, sweet turned to something else entirely.