“Why can’t he just move here?” I mumbled it, the way I still do when I can’t not say something, but I don’t really want people to hear me, especially the one I’m saying it to. Meena says I’ve practically quit doing that, but I know I haven’t.

“Honey, that’s where his work is,” Sally said. God, I remember it used to drive me wild that she’d never talk about Evan’s job, it always had to be his work. “I can do what I do anywhere, but Evan’s got to be in England, in London. Besides, the boys are there, Tony and Julian, they’re in school—”

“Well, I’m in school, too,” I said. “In case you didn’t notice.” Mister Cat jumped down from the top of the refrigerator and stalked across the table to me with his legs all stiff, doing his Frankenstein-cat number. I hadn’t seen him on the refrigerator, but Mister Cat’s always there or gone, he’s never anywhere in between. That’s how I wanted to be, that’s what I mean about being invisible. Most black cats are really a kind of red-brown underneath, if you see them in the right light, but Mister Cat’s black right through, even though he’s half-Siamese. “Black to the bone,” my friend Marta Velez used to say. He stood up and put his paws around my neck, and I could feel him purring without a sound, the way he always does. He smelled like warm toast—dark, dark toast, when you get it out just right, just before it burns.

“You could take him with you,” Sally said, really quickly, as though I didn’t know it. “He’d have to wait out quarantine, but that’s just a month, I think.” She looked at me sideways again. She said, “You know, I had this crazy idea you might actually be glad to start a whole different life somewhere else—another country, new school, new people, new friends, new ways of doing things. I mean, let’s face it, it’s not as though you’ve been having such a great time this last year or two—”