He didn’t realize you were really gone until the cat stopped eating.

At first, he thought the cat was just sulking. You always said he was a drama queen, even when you first scooped him off the side of the road, bloody and terrified, all those years ago. He thought a few days without you would make him get over it. He thought a lot of stupid things.

But the cat didn’t get over it. Neither did he.

The house felt… amputated without you. The walls didn’t echo with your soft voice or the way you laughed, half-sigh, half-music. Even the floorboards seemed colder. The woman still hung around—Elena, the charity case turned shadow in his life—but it didn’t matter. She could sit across from him at dinner, tell her tired stories, even reach out her hand across the table, but there was no world where she would ever be you.

The cat knew it too. Every night, he curled up on your side of the bed, the small, ragged thing you once saved now saving some tiny scrap of you. When he dared to sit too close to your old pillow, the cat would hiss, low and resentful, like he blamed him for everything. Maybe he was right.

The cat stared at the front door like he expected you to walk back through it any second. He started staring too. God, how he stared.

He tried to feed the cat, but it wouldn’t eat until he remembered—you always placed the bowl against the left leg of the kitchen island, precisely aligned with the grain of the wood. Not an inch off. The moment he slid it there, the cat ate like he hadn’t seen food in days.

You left everything else behind but your perfume—some delicate, ghostly scent that clung to the room like a memory he couldn’t quite touch. One night, desperate, he sprayed it on the bed. He pressed his face into the pillows, wrapping them in his arms like a fool, pretending they were warm with your body still. Pretending he could still say I’m sorry and hear you sigh and tell him I’m here.

But you weren’t. You aren’t.

And every night, he and the cat wait by the door, listening for footsteps that don’t come.