I wrote the one about the car ride home.
I wrote the one about David falling asleep against the window.
I wrote the one about watching him and knowing.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even good.
But it was written, and it was true, and for the first time in months, the cursor had moved forward instead of blinking in place.
When I saved the file and closed the laptop, the apartment was quiet around me in a way that felt less like emptiness and more like the particular hush that follows a conversation that mattered.
Chapter 17
Benji
“Absolutely not,” I said, looking at the photos on his laptop. “Peter. PETER. These look like mugshots. These look like the kittens committed a crime and you’re documenting them for the police.”
Peter needed adoption photos for the kittens, and I had opinions.
“They’re standard clinic photos,” he argued. “White background, good lighting, clear view of the face and body.”
“They’redepressing, Peter. Look at this one.” I pointed at the screen, where LaTavia was staring at the camera with the wide, frozen expression of a hardened criminal who had been placed on a white sheet under a fluorescent light and told to be adoptable. “She looks like she’s being held hostage. Shit, Peter, she looks like she’s blinking ‘help me’ in Morse code.”
“She looks like a cat.”
“She looks like a cat who has given up on life. Andthisone.” I swiped to Beyoncé’s photo, which was blurry because Beyoncé had obviously been in the process of escaping when the shutter clicked. “This isn’t even a photo. It is a crime scene. I can clearly hear the police saying into the camera, ‘This is the last known image before the subject disappeared.’”
Peter was leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, watching me critique his photography. He understood, after months of forced cohabitation, that once I engaged with a topic at this volume, the most efficient path to resolution was to let the energy run its course.
“They’re adoption photos,” he said. “They don’t need to be art.”
“They absolutely need to be art. These photos are the kittens’ Glamor Shots. They are the difference between someone scrolling past and falling in love. You have five incredible kittens who need homes in two weeks, and you’re sending them into the job market with the visual equivalent of a LinkedIn profile taken in a bathroom mirror.”
“Fine. What do you suggest?”
I was stunned. His surrender had come far too easily. This had to be a trap.
“I suggest,” I said slowly and deliberately, waitingfor the springer to spring and teeth to snap and my foot to be snared. “You let me do a photo shoot.”
“A photo shoot?”
“Aprofessionalphoto shoot with good lighting, good backgrounds, and personality-driven compositions. Each kitten gets a setup that matches his or her individual vibe. Beyoncé gets action shots because she’s a diva and an escape artist. LaTavia gets soft lighting because she’s gentle and deserves to look like the angel she is. Kelly gets something cozy because she’s the cuddler. Solange gets the regal treatment because she’s the quiet one with hidden depths. And LeToya . . .” I paused. “What does LeToya do, exactly? What is LeToya’s whole thing?”
“LeToya bites.”
“LeToya gets an edgy shoot. She’s punk rock kitten. We lean into it.”
Peter stared, eyes squinted, for a very, very long moment.
His face was doing the thing where multiple expressions competed for dominance and none of them won, resulting in a kind of tectonic stalemate that read as neutral but that I’d learned to interpret as an active internal debate.
“When?” he asked.
“Saturday. You’re off, I don’t work until five, and the light in the living room is best between ten andnoon.”
“You’ve assessed the light in my living room.”
“I’ve been filming TikToks in your living room for months, Peter. I know where every photon in this apartment goes. The ten o’clock light comes through the east window and hits the couch at an angle that makes everything look warm and golden. By noon, it moves to the kitchen and the whole room goes flat. We have a two-hour window. This is a precision operation.”
