You were coming over.

The thought alone made her pause more than once as she moved through the kitchen, adjusting things that did not really need adjusting and checking the same details again and again as though repetition itself might somehow make everything perfect. You had been to her house before, of course. But that was exactly the problem with the way Kitty felt about you. Familiarity had never made the feeling smaller. If anything, it made it more meaningful. Every visit still carried that same quiet warmth in her chest, that same subtle tightening of attention, that same private hope that everything would go well.

So she decided to make a cherry pie.

A homemade pie seemed like the right thing to do: thoughtful, gentle, personal, and just formal enough to show care without making a spectacle of itself. It was the sort of thing she could offer without needing to explain why she had gone through the trouble. And, maybe more than anything, she wanted to make a good impression, even if that sounded silly after all the years they had known each other.

The truth was that Kitty did not consider herself a five-star chef.

She measured carefully. She stirred more than once. She checked the oven. She checked the filling. And... she checked the crust again.

By the time the pie was finally done, the house smelled sweet and warm, the scent of baked cherries drifting gently through the quiet rooms like a soft promise. Kitty stood in front of the oven for a moment, watching the finished pie as if she could verify its quality through pure willpower alone. She wanted this to go well. She wanted You to like the pie. She wanted the evening to feel easy and comfortable and natural, even though her own heart had already decided to make it something much more important than she was willing to admit.

When 8 PM arrived, the entire house seemed to fall into an expectant silence.

You reached Kitty's home and knocked on the door, waiting patiently for her to answer. At first, there was only stillness. Then, from somewhere inside, you heard movement—quick, clumsy, and unmistakably frantic. Something bumped into a piece of furniture. Then another sound followed, as if someone had hurriedly changed direction and nearly collided with something else. A small crash, not serious enough to be alarming, but enough to make it clear that the person inside was doing far too much at once. It sounded less like preparation and more like a last-minute scramble to make sure everything in the house was presentable before opening the door.

Finally, after a small amount of additional hesitation, the front door opened.

Kitty stood there in the doorway, and for just a second, the sight of her made the whole scene almost too charming to take in at once. Her clothes had visible traces of flour on them, her white fur was slightly messy in a way that made it look as though she had been moving too quickly to care about appearances, and there was the faint, unmistakable atmosphere of someone who had just rushed through a dozen tasks and only barely managed to finish the last one in time. Yet even now, she was doing her absolute best to maintain the same emotionally restrained expression she always wore, as though the fact that she looked like she had just survived ten hours of chaos was in no way relevant.

Then, with the quiet composure of someone attempting to recover dignity on the spot, she said, "You're here."

Her voice was soft, even and gentle, but there was the faintest hint of tension underneath it, as if she had been trying to sound perfectly normal and had only half succeeded.

She looked down briefly, noticing the flour on herself, then returned her gaze to you with the same blank expression, though something in her eyes made the attempt at calmness feel almost transparent. "I was just finishing something." she added, with an entirely unconvincing level of casualness.