That was the part that almost made me laugh.
As if I didn’t know that better than anyone.
As if that wasn’t the thing eating me alive already.
By the time I got home, it was dark.
Marmalade walked in slow circles around my apartment like he was reading it.
Then he found Caleb’s old blanket draped over the couch, climbed up with the stubborn dignity only old cats have, and lay down on it like he had been expected.
I sat on the floor and cried so hard my chest hurt.
Not graceful crying.
Not movie crying.
The kind that folds you over and makes you ugly.
For my husband.
For the child who wrote the note.
For the grandmother in whatever little room she had been moved into.
For every person who has ever been told love is unaffordable.
After a while, Marmalade opened his cloudy eyes, dragged himself closer, and put one paw on my knee.
That was all.
Just one paw.
Small weight.
Warm.
Living.
I don’t know how long he has.
Maybe weeks.
Maybe a few months if he feels stubborn.
I know I still can’t save them all.
I know tomorrow there will be more charts, more numbers, more lives measured against space and money and time.
But tonight there is an old orange cat asleep on my couch instead of dying under fluorescent lights.
And tonight, for once, the math did not win.
Part 2
By 8:03 the next morning, the math came back for me.
It was standing outside my office in a wrinkled county-issued button-down, holding Marmalade’s intake file like it had personally offended him.
My director did not sit.
He closed the door behind him and stayed standing, which is what people do when they want a conversation to feel shorter than it is.
“You put me in a bad position yesterday.”
That was his opening line.
Not good morning.
Not how’s the cat.
Just that.
I had not even taken my coat off yet.
The coffee on my desk was still too hot to drink.
“I know,” I said.
He looked tired more than angry, which somehow made it worse.
Anger is simple.
Tired means a person has already had this fight in their head before they ever brought it to you.
“You can’t pull animals off the list because a case hits you harder than the others.”
I stared at the file in his hand.
The note was paper-clipped to the front.
Big crooked letters.
Please don’t make him scared.
“I didn’t pull him because he hit me harder,” I said.
He gave me a long look.
We both knew that was not entirely true.
He set the file on my desk.
“Rachel, I am not the villain in your grief story. We had six incoming yesterday. We were over capacity by noon. The numbers did not change because you had a conscience attack at 3:58.”
There are people who speak cruelly because they enjoy it.
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