I was having a nightmare about being suffocated by a sweater—like a crime-show hospital-bed mob hit, but way fluffier—when I realized it was actually Julia Caesar lying on my face. I picked her up and put her on my chest, where she sat with her head hanging down between her shoulders like a tiny, exhausted walrus.

I pulled a couple of pieces of cat hair off my tongue and ran my hand down the silky fur on her head and back. She pushed her bony head against my hand and adjusted her mouth over her underbite. With more force than was at all necessary, she kneaded her paws into my pecs. “Easy, tiger,” I whispered. She eased up about one percent.

It was late, I could tell that right away by the slant of the sun and also, of course, from the way Julia was giving me the eye. Breakfast. Sound familiar? Yes? So then make it for me.

But I wasn’t going anywhere, not yet, and I didn’t care if I was getting the stink-eye from a chubby apex predator. Only one thing mattered, now and always, and that was Rosie. Next to me, she was still tucked up in her adorable little ball. She was naked, and her hair was a perfect mess. With the lightest touch I could manage, being careful not to wake her, I smoothed the sheets over her and swept her bangs aside. I could’ve stayed in bed forever and watched her—she was painfully pretty, breathtakingly sweet. My Rosie.

Julia, though, she had no interest in loving gazes. Her plucks on my chest got more intense, and I felt the very tip of one of her claws scratch my skin. “Okay, okay,” I whispered to her. I slipped out of the sheets and pulled my boxers over my totally raging Rosie hard-on, made sure the horse was safely in the stall, and scooped some cat food out for Julia into her bowl. Julia stared at the vaguely fish-shaped pieces of vaguely fishy-smelling cat kibbles. Then looked up at me. You cannot comprehend the depths of how this offends me.

I shook my head at her. “No SPAM,” I whispered. She placed her paw to something that looked like a slightly squishy goldfish and dead-eyed me like she couldn’t imagine what she’d done to deserve this unending daily abuse. I flashed back to a meme I’d once seen, about a cat keeping a diary. Day 8,718 of my captivity. The human has attempted to feed me fish from a paper bag again. Their hunting skills are not improving.

I reached down and gave her a pat to make up for the cat food, and she gave me a somewhat muted purr. Then I cracked the window and lifted the screen for her as the swallows took off en masse.

Downstairs, Cupcake greeted me like I’d been gone for seven hundred years. She got so excited that she mistook the little kitchen rug that Rosie had put in front of the sink after the flood for a chew toy and yanked it around the kitchen like a big, multicolored mop. To distract her, I took a cookie from the bag and tossed it into the living room, and then stashed the rug on the top shelf of the pantry. I got the coffee ready and set up Rosie’s breakfast tray. While the water boiled, I looked out at the big yard. The sun was shining through the morning mist, and the birds were chirping. Julia was gulping down what might have been a whole bird—were those legs sticking out of her mouth?—but I didn’t look too close. Paradise was paradise; it was that simple. The place was really just gorgeous, hardly any spot in the world I liked better. I could almost imagine Cupcake trucking through the high grass, chasing dandelion fluff. But it’d only be safe to do that with a fence.

Like a fucking mirage, it came to me, hazy and dreamy in the morning mist. It danced up before me, plank by plank…

A white one, with points on the slats. Pure Americana. The vision of happiness. A picket fence.

But then my eyes fell on the For Sale sign next to the front walk. It swung in the light breeze, its red, white, and blue letters slightly faded from being used so often elsewhere before. The toast popped up from the toaster, and I wondered about how this was all going to play out. Would she want to stay here, I wondered, if she could? Or would she want someplace new, maybe even a place I built for her? With a detached studio, with a lot of land, right up against the woods? Or maybe on the shore. She loved the ocean, and I could imagine her there, working away, wandering around in the dunes, waving to me as she kept her sun hat from blowing away with her other hand.

I inhaled hard and blinked off the daydreams, spreading peanut butter on the hot toast.

The kettle boiled, and I poured it over the coffee grounds. Picket fences and seaside studios? I was getting ahead of myself, and I knew it. The fact was that before any of that, before I sank a single post and before I looked up plans about how to make kids’ jungle gyms, there was something I had to do first. A question I needed to ask. A huge fucking step that made cliff jumping off Katahdin look like a joke.

I was ready. But I couldn’t do it empty-handed.

* * *

The bank manager was flipping the sign on the door to OPEN when I walked up. Her name was Jeanie, and she’d been working at Truelove Bank and Trust for as long as I could remember. “Mr. Doyle!” she chirped and held the door open for me. She had a dusting of what looked like powdered sugar on the front of her black shirt. Her hair was a puff of frizzy red curls.

“Morning, Jeanie.”

“What can I do for you?” She led me into the bank and picked up a donut off a paper napkin on her desk. Another small blizzard of sugar fell softly over what was already there. “Donut?” She gestured to a small box of donuts from the grocery, stacked up in two tidy horizontal rows.

Normally, the answer would be a hell yes. I was a red-blooded Maine carpenter; I never said no to donuts. But today I was on a mission. “I’m good, thanks.” I pulled my keys from my pocket and chose the smallest one, which I held between thumb and forefinger. “I need to get into my safety deposit box.”

Jeanie’s eyes twinkled. She’d been the one who opened the box for me in the first place. She knew what it contained, and she paused with the donut halfway to her mouth. She knew what was in there because I’d shown her, and because she’d seen it on my mom, too. “Oh, Mr. Doyle…does that mean?”

My keys swung like a pendulum from the ring. “Yes, ma’am.”

Jeanie tucked the rest of the donut into her mouth and clapped, sending the powdered sugar twinkling into the morning sun.