Shiloh’s death wasn’t an easy subject, but Tia hadn’t been able to hide her problems from him. She’d even let him invite his mother over to meet her, which couldn’t have been easy so soon after the accident. “Have you ever heard of cat scratch disease?”

She set her cup in its saucer. “No.”

“I’m not surprised.” What’d happened was so crazy and unlikely he couldn’t help feeling robbed. Cats scratched people every day. Very few of them died because of it. “If a cat licks an open wound on a human or bites or scratches deeply enough to break the skin, it can cause a bacterial infection that can travel to the brain or the heart.”

Lines showing sympathy creased her normally smooth forehead. “I didn’t even realize that could be dangerous.”

“Neither did I. Most people—those who aren’t already immunocompromised—have no trouble overcoming it. But there’s—” he stared down at his food, which suddenly tasted like cardboard “—always the exception.”

“So...was it her cat or your cat—a pet—that made her sick?”

“We didn’t have one cat in particular because we were always so overrun. She’d made it her life’s mission to save the feral cats in our neighborhood, and one scratched her deeply while she was trying to capture it.”

“You’d think antibiotics would be able to take care of that,” she murmured.

He got that response a lot, which was why he found it so difficult to face Shiloh’s parents. He couldn’t help assuming they believed the same thing—that it should’ve been easy to save her—and blamed him for her death.

Had he been home when she got sick, she probably would’ve survived. That didn’t make the situation any easier. “You would,” he agreed. “But there were...extenuating circumstances.”

When she acted as though she’d let it go at that rather than press him, he realized he was still being too guarded and made an attempt to push even further beyond his comfort zone. “Okay. Here’s the story. I had a gallery showing in New York at the time. Shiloh had more cats than usual—one she was nursing back to health—and several meetings with potential families to place them in homes. So she decided not to come with me.”

“That’s when it happened?” she asked softly.

“That’s when it started,” he corrected. “I was two days into my trip when she said she wasn’t feeling well.”

“Did she tell you she’d been scratched?”