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“Oh my gosh! It’s a cat!” Viv cried, jumping off the bed and running to the wall. “Dad! Do something! There’s a cat stuck in the wall!”

Art rolled his eyes good-naturedly again while muttering something under his breath about mice and cats. They tapped on the panels in tandem until Art cried out victoriously. “This one is loose! We need something flat and skinny.”

I pulled out the box cutter tucked in my back pocket and brandished it at him. “Will this do?” I asked.

“Perfect!” Art shot me an appreciative glance so full of heat that it made me blush all over again, as did the finger promising more later that he trailed along my palm when he took the tool from me, murmuring, “Gorgeous and resourceful. You really are the whole package.”

Pushing the box cutter open, he whirled back around and carefully pushed the blade into the crack separating the two panels and wiggled it until it was far enough in to give him a little leverage. With a small pop, the panel came loose and fell into his hand.

All three of us leaned forward to peer into the darkness, but there was nothing to see until Viv whipped out her phone and turned on the flashlight.

She aimed it into the cavernous space and almost dropped it when two unblinking, bright-yellow, glowing eyes stared right back at us.

“It’s a cat! I knew it!” she cried, shoving the phone into my hand to free hers up.

Before either her father or I could utter warnings about animals that looked like cats in the dark, rabies, or any one of another dozen reasons not to, she plunged her arms into the hole.

FOURTEEN

“She’s so cute. I can’t stand it!” Viv cried, holding the tiny thing to her chest.

I tried hard not to recoil. The cat was very cute with its tiny pink nose and big round green eyes that stood out starkly against its black fur. It couldn’t have weighed more than six or seven pounds, and it hadn’t had a decent meal in far too long, if its dull coat and protruding ribs were anything to go by. I felt sorry for the little thing, but for all we knew, it could have been crawling with fleas, ticks, and worms or, worse, riddled with disease.

In the chaos following the extraction of the tiny, surprisingly feisty little thing from its hidey-hole behind the wall, I remembered that rabies wasn’t a thing in the U.K., so that was one less thing to worry about. Which didn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about other ways it could harm the children.

As a flurry of very valid reasons to toss the cat out into the street ran through my head, Art made kissy noises at the little cat, who, shockingly, purred at him in response. The finger he was rubbing in gentle circles on its head might have had something to do with it.

Viv was equally enamored of the frail little thing tucked under her chin, and the only reason Merry wasn’t also melting into a pile of goo over the cat was because he was still banging around in his own room and hadn’t yet realized there was a tiny animal to fawn over. It was only a matter of time before I was outnumbered three to one over whether or not the cat could stay.

Sometimes the game gets called before kickoff even happens, toots, Grandma drawled from the other side of the huddle. Even she, who’d once left one of my cousins out on the porch in the middle of winter because she was five minutes late for curfew, was cooing at the cat.

She was nineteen, and she’d been warned half a dozen times. And it’s not like I let her freeze out there. I tossed her a blanket! she protested half-heartedly, too distracted by the cat staring her down to give her argument much heat. I think it can see me! Look! To her utter delight, the cat followed her movement as she floated right, then left, then right again, only stopping when it lost interest and closed its eyes. Amazing! Who knew?

I sighed. Make that outnumbered four to one.

“It needs a bath and some food,” I said, directing my comment at the two flesh-and-blood humans discussing whether the cat was a girl or a boy without doing the obvious thing and turning it over to check. As if it heard what I was thinking, the cat cracked open an eye and pinned me with it, lifting the side of its lip just enough to make its sharp canine glint in the light. It didn’t take a cat mind-reader to guess what it would do to me if I tried.

Viv’s head popped up. “We can keep her?” she asked, her voice painfully full of hope.

“That’s up to your dad,” I replied, shrugging, as though he wasn’t also looking at me like he’d never wanted anything more in his life.

Catching the expression on my face, he schooled his own and did his best to play it cool. “If Meg says it’s okay with her, it’s fine by me. But you’re in charge,” he said, frowning sternly at his daughter, whose eyes could not have gotten any bigger if she’d tried.

She clutched the cat to her chest hard enough to make it squeak and squealed as quietly as possible. “Yes! Yes! Of course! Thank you, Daddy!”

“That means you’ll feed him and take care of his kitty litter as well as any messes he makes around the house,” Art continued. If she heard the skepticism in his tone, she was too busy crooning to the cat to let on.

“You can always ask for help, if you need it,” I added, feeling a little bad for the teen. I remembered all too well what it was like to have people think I was useless and feeling like no one cared enough to help me out.

“I shall call you Squishy, and you shall be mine!” she sing-songed to it.

“Aaaaaand you can’t call him Squishy,” Art deadpanned almost as an afterthought.

“Daaaaaad,” Viv protested.

“Nope. No more pets named Squishy. Three was more than enough,” he replied, rolling his eyes when I looked at him for an explanation. “We had Squishy the fish, then Squishy the mouse, and finally Squishy the raccoon who lived outside, and thankfully was more of a regular visitor than an actual pet. I can’t even imagine what having one indoors would be like.”

I laughed softly and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. The woman who owns the bookshop in my hometown has a pet raccoon. It’s surprisingly well behaved.”