Chapter 12: The Team-Up

The Mercedes pulled out of the alley with a squeal of tires.

By the time I got the back door open, there was nothing but exhaust and a cat hiding under the dumpster.

"Who was that?" Ben said behind me, the kettle still in his hand.

"My brother."

Then he came and stood beside me in the doorway, close enough that our arms touched.

"Does he follow you a lot?"

"He's started."

"Okay," Ben said. "Then you're getting a cab home, and you're texting me when you're inside, and I'm putting a lock on that window."

We drank the tea sitting on the clean kennel floor.

He held my hand, his thumb moving over my knuckles, and that was somehow worse than the kiss, and better.

At two he walked me to the cab and kissed me through the open window.

I texted him from my bedroom with the lock turned.

In the morning I found Bradley in the kitchen.

He was sitting at the marble island in a bathrobe with his phone flat in front of him and the ragdoll sitting beside it.

She'd grown in two weeks. She was all fluff now, cream and gray, with a plume of a tail.

"You called the health department," I said. "From the landline."

Bradley didn't even look up.

"Wasn't me," he said. "Ask the cat."

Jenna looked at me over the phone and slowly blinked.

"He's not lying," she said. "It was my idea. He just dialed."

It took me until April to understand what I was seeing.

Bradley had stopped going out.

He had no car, no watches and no money, and his friends had stopped answering. He stayed home with his kitten.

And his kitten was teaching him.

I came down for coffee one night and found him at the island at one in the morning.

He had a big-letter keyboard app open on his phone.

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