“It sounds like you think paying gives you a claim.”
Marcus closed his eyes for one second.
“I am trying to help care for him.”
“I can care for him.”
“I know.”
“Then stop.”
Lily stopped petting Nacho.
Marcus picked up the food.
“We should go.”
“No.”
He looked at me.
I took a breath.
“Leave it,” I said. “The food.”
He set it down again.
That small act felt bigger than it was.
It was the first time I allowed something from their home to become part of mine without treating it like a threat.
We sat at the kitchen table while Lily played with Nacho.
Marcus told me how they had found him.
The building where Marcus worked had backed up to an empty lot.
One cold morning, Lily had been waiting in the car because school was delayed.
She saw an orange cat crawl from beneath a stack of wooden pallets.
He walked straight toward her.
“He was wearing a collar,” Marcus said.
I stared at him.
“What collar?”
“Blue fabric. No tag.”
Nacho had been wearing a blue collar the night he disappeared.
I had bought it two weeks earlier.
“Do you still have it?”
Marcus shook his head.
“It was frayed. We kept it in a drawer for a long time, but it got lost when we moved.”
The information made me dizzy.
He really had gone from my house to theirs.
There had been no other owner between us.
No secret explanation.
Just distance.
Just bad luck.
Just a chain of ordinary moments no one could undo.
“I searched that town,” I said.
Marcus looked surprised.
“When?”
“About two months after he disappeared. Someone called and said they saw an orange cat near a gas station.”
“The old building was less than a mile from there.”
I pressed my fingers to my forehead.
Less than a mile.
For years, I had imagined Nacho in distant places.
The truth was worse.
I had been close.
Close enough to drive past the street where Lily held him in her coat.
Close enough that one flyer on the right wall might have changed everything.
“I put flyers up,” I said.
“Where?”
“Store windows. Light poles. The library board.”
Marcus shook his head slowly.
“I never saw them.”
“I never saw yours.”
There it was.
The cruel space between people who were both trying.
We like to believe effort guarantees connection.
It does not.
