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I got home late and wrote straight through into the small hours in the gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled over my hands and the laptop running hot on my thighs, and I didn’t stop until my eyes gave out.

On the weekend we drove to the rescue, and I was there for all of it and still didn’t see it coming.

It was Iris’s idea, in the sense that it had been Iris’s idea from the minute she first laid eyes on the kitten at the adoption pens. Gerald had been on strike for weeks. There were sidewalk cats in three colors of chalk down the length of the driveway. Cole was sending photographs. Kasperi was sending Finnish rescue listings. Ryan had abstained, which Maren informed me was the most damning position in the room.

Eli said, over coffee, with his elbows on the counter and without any preamble, “Get your shoes.”

Iris looked up.

“Get your shoes, bug.”

“Where are we going?”

“You know where we’re going.”

She froze on her stool with both palms down on the counter, and her face changed into an expression I’d never seen on her, which was doubt. “For real?”

“For real.”

Then she screamed.

Desert Tails was a strip unit off Bell Road, out past Glendale, clear across town, with a sun-faded banner and a bell over the door and the smell those places all had, disinfectant over warm animal, with wet newspaper under it. The woman at the desk was about sixty with reading glasses on a beaded chain that clicked against her shirt buttons when she leaned.

Her head turned to Iris, and then to Eli, and stayed there.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re here.” Her face warmed and turned knowing, and she stepped out from behind the desk. “She’s still in the back. Let me get her.”

Four facts landed on me inside one breath. The woman knew him. She wasn’t surprised to see him. She’d said she’s still in the back instead of let me show you what we have. When she brought the crate out there was a laminated card clipped to it, and on the card, in ballpoint, in a hand that wasn’t his, were a name and a word. The laminate had bubbled up at one corner and the pen had pressed clear through the paper.

The name on it was Kovac. The word was hold, in capitals, gone over twice and underlined.

I put it together standing on a rubber mat next to a rack of cat toys. Weeks back, Iris met the kitten and asked, and he said no. Then he got in his truck on a morning off, drove clear across town, put a hold on an orange kitten, paid the fee, and said nothing to a living soul. Then he came home and went on saying no every single day after, while a stuffed dragon starved in his kitchen and his entire team mocked him by text.

He caught me putting it together. His face didn’t move, but the tips of his ears were red.

“Don’t,” he said, very quietly.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re going to.”

“I am going to say something eventually, yes. Not here.” I got my voice under control. “You lost before you ever got in that truck.”

“I lost the first time she asked,” Eli said. “The truck was paperwork.”

I wanted to put him up against the rack of cat toys and kiss him until the woman with the beaded chain had to separate us. I got hold of the strap of my bag instead and pulled until the nylon cut a line into my palm.

The kitten came out. Her ears were too big for her head and all of her would have fit in one of his hands. Iris didn’t grab. She got down flat on the mat and put one hand out and waited, and her hand was shaking and she held it there anyway, and the orange kitten came across the floor with her tail straight up and walked into her hand.

Iris looked up at her father. Eli looked at the kitten. The kitten stopped, and turned her head, and looked at Eli. Neither of them blinked. I stayed out of it.

“Okay,” Eli said.

He signed the bottom of both pages and initialed the line about the spay. The woman put the kitten into a cardboard carrier with air holes punched down both sides and laid the vaccination record on top. Iris carried the vaccination record out to the truck flat on both palms, walking slow, with her eyes on it every step. She named the kitten in the truck.

“Gerald says her name is Zamboni.”

“Gerald says,” Eli repeated.