"He's gonna bolt."
"He's not going to bolt. Set him down. Stay between him and the door."
He set the bundle down on my kitchen table, slowly, both hands cupping the bottom like he was setting down something he didn't want to wake.
The jacket fell open at the top, and the cat came up out of it like a snake—small, brown and gray, ribs you could count, one eye crusted half-shut, the other eye yellow and very awake. He hissed. He spat. He went flat against my placemat and tried to make himself smaller than he was. About seven pounds of cat trying to be three.
"Hey, sir," I said, low. "Hey. We're okay."
I had a crate in the hall closet I'd packed for Moose for the move and never unpacked. I went and got it, set it on the floor next to the radiator, lined the bottom with the dish towel off the oven handle, and threw a second towel half over the top so the inside went dark.
"Easton. Get behind him. Don't move fast. Just be a wall."
He moved. He didn't ask why. He stood square between the cat and the back door, arms loose at his sides, six-three of firefighter being exactly what I'd asked him to be.
I came at the cat low and slow with the towel from the back of a kitchen chair. I let him see me. I let him see the towel. I let him decide I was a thing he couldn't get past, and when his weight shifted, I had him.
He hissed into the towel. I held him close to my chest, the muscle memory of a thousand frightened cats from school taking over. I crossed the kitchen with him bundled, lowered him into the crate, and let him go.
He went straight to the back corner.
I latched the door.
I stayed crouched in front of the crate for a beat with my hand flat on the towel over the top. He had stopped hissing. He was breathing too fast and too shallow, the way a small animal breathes when it has been running on fear for longer than its body can keep up with.
"You're alright, sir. You sit there. I'll see you in a minute."
I stood up.
Easton was at the counter, watching me with the same face he'd worn watching Sof Cabrera lift Penny's lip in an exam room three weeks ago.
I looked at him properly for the first time since I'd opened the door.
He was bleeding from the cut on his temple. A long scratch down the side of his neck had gone into the collar of his T-shirt. The backs of both his hands were open in places I didn't want to count yet. There was blood on his cuff and on the front of his jacket. None of it wasbleeding I needed to call anybody about. All of it wasbleeding I was going to clean up myself.
"Counter."
"Lean back."
"Astrid, I can do it."
"Counter, Easton. Sit."
He sat. Even bleeding from eight places, he sat the moment I told him to—and we both clocked it.
I went to the bathroom and got my kit. Iodine. Gauze. Saline. Hibiclens. The fine-tipped tweezers I'd had since school. I set it on the counter beside his hip.
He'd unbuttoned the rest of the jacket and dropped it on the floor next to my dishwasher. He was in a navy T-shirt withthe Hartsdale Fire crest at the chest, his uniform pants, and his boots.
"Lean back. I need to see the temple."
He leaned.
I stepped between his knees because that was where the overhead light was best, and I started on the cut at his temple. Saline first. He didn't flinch. The cut was clean and shallower than it looked.
"Tell me how this happened."
"Cat call. Engine compartment of an abandoned Buick out past the river. Halsey said leave it. I said no."
