Page 50 of Kitten

“Did you check?”

I didn’t need to. The only thing keeping her from running outside was the locked door.

“And you know she went to the sea?” Isabelle wrangled an excited Bruno and clipped the leash onto his collar.

I nodded, remembering Silver’s pained meows. “She was desperate to get out.”

“And how long ago did you…” She paused. “Lose her?”

“I don’t know, maybe an hour, an hour and a half?”

My phone rang. James’s face filled the screen. Isabelle and I froze. I let it go to voicemail. He would never forgive me for this, I thought, and that would be fair.

“You don’t know that she’s gone,” Isabelle said. “I’ll help you look.”

“Now?”

“Of course,” she said. “No time to lose.”

Instead of retreating to change like I expected, Isabelle slipped on her sneakers and walked straight out the front door. Bruno trailed behind her. I was grateful for her determination, but it pained me. I knew Silver was gone. Isabelle would only be disappointed.

Isabelle drove us into town. We walked down Main Street and searched around every shop. It didn’t take long, there were only a dozen stores or so. I told Isabelle what James said about cats not liking town and steered her to the beach. Since the morning, it had filled with people, middle-agedwomen in sheer clothing and topless sunburning men and children shaking buckets of sand. Bruno stopped many times to sniff at nothing. Isabelle jogged from stranger to stranger, asking if they’d seen a cat. They shook their heads, some even laughed. I fought the urge to kick them.

When we neared the water, Isabelle started calling Silver’s name. Her cries melted into the roar of the ocean. With each crashing wave, I felt my stomach turn until I found myself on my knees, gagging.

Our search lasted a couple more hours. By the time the air chilled and the beach began to empty, Isabelle seemed to have understood what I already knew. Her hand burned against my back. “Let’s take a break,” she said. She led me to a crag away from the remaining people. “I think this is where James found her. Maybe she’ll come to us here.”

Isabelle’s beautiful pajama sleeves were wet and caked with sand. How could I repay her for this kindness? I couldn’t even replace her clothes.

Sitting on the crag forced us into an unfamiliar proximity. The silk of Isabelle’s pants fluttered against my skin. In the distance, bodies glinted on the surface of the sea like pieces of confetti. Bored by our stasis, or perhaps attracted to something else, Bruno cantered out to the indigo water. Beneath him, the sand darkened with paw prints before becoming smooth again. I wondered if Silver’s paws ever left prints and found that I couldn’t remember. She must have been too light.

Isabelle broke the silence. “James will forgive you.”

“I don’t think he should.”

“Sure, well. He will anyway.”

I closed my eyes. Green blotches formed under the skin of my eyelids. “I think,” I said, “that for our whole relationship, I’ve been waiting for myself to do something unforgivable. And now I’ve done it.”

“I get it.” Isabelle’s voice was barely audible over the waves. “You want to prove that you’re bad. It’s self-destructive.”

I repeated the word out loud. Lou used to call me self-destructive, particularly on nights when I got too drunk, or when I nearly dropped out of school. I saw these as frivolous acts, proof of my lack of suitability to real life.Self-destructionwas just another Lou-ism borrowed from her therapy vernacular. It was for people who had a self important enough to protect. Lou had a self. So did James and Isabelle. What was it that made their selves so clear, was it their money? But even Silver had a self, that was obvious: she made her own choices and stuck by them. The issue was that I didn’t choose anything.

As soon as the thought formed, I knew it was a lie. I chose to leave my mother. I chose to lie to James. I chose to keep Silver at Holme. And now I was here, far from my mother, away from James, without Silver. It turned out that not believing I was making choices didn’t make the choices any less real. My life was not some distant thing waiting to happen—I made it happen all the time.

When I opened my eyes, the world was patchy with sunspots.

“It’s an honest mistake,” Isabelle said. “James isn’t going to blame you.”

I didn’t tell her that I wanted to be blamed.

“If you tell him what happened, and let him forgive you,” Isabelle said, “he will. But you have to let him, otherwise you’ll both suffer. I know what he’s like.”

Isabelle spoke in a calm, practiced manner, and I saw she understood James in a way I didn’t yet. “James is a very caring person,” she said. “He looks after his mother, he looks after me sometimes, he even looks aftermymother. He’s been like that since he was a kid. I don’t think he does it deliberately—or maybe he does, he’s just not thinking about it that deeply. But he will want to make sure you’re okay.”

I recalled the way James spoke about Isabelle. She was a very sensitive person, he said. He had many ideas for how she could be happier. Maybe that was why he was such good friends with her. A thought came to me, uncomfortable. “I think it might be a bad thing that he cares for me this much.”

“What do you mean?”