“Not helpful,” I said through my own subsequent and inevitable yawn. “And there’s Charlie Seller. He wants the cottage for himself and he likes to get what he wants. Ian . . .” I sighed. “It really doesn’t look good for Ian and—and what are you doing?”

Less than two seconds previously, Eddie had been flopped flat on the floor. Now he was scampering around the living room, bouncing frenetically from couch to chair to ottoman to end table.

“Watch it, will you?”

Since Eddie was a cat, my question was essentially rhetorical. Yes, he’d watch it, because he was fleet of foot and very concerned about his image. But would he be careful not to damage anything? Not so much.

“You’re troubling me,” I told him, as he continued his pinball-like actions. “Don’t wear yourself out, okay? You’re not as young as you used to be.”

He stopped and glared at me. “Mrr!”

“Sorry, but it’s true. None of us are. Aging is a fact of life.”

“Mrr!” he said, and bolted into the dining room, a room that doubled as our library.

“You are so weird,” I muttered, following just to see what he was up to. Of course he got up on the dining table when we weren’t home, but it would be nice if he stayed off it when a human was in the same room.

I got there just in time to see my fuzzy friend crawl on top of a low bookshelf. “Seriously?” I asked. “You honestly think you’re going to fit behind those books?”

Though I’d expected a “Mrr” in response, what I got was the sight of Eddie’s hind legs flailing in the air as his front half tried to slide behind a shelf full of oversized books. Atlases and nature photography, mostly, with a smattering of art and architecture.

Eddie made a noise that wasn’t quite a “mrr” and disappeared from view.

“Hope you don’t think I’m going to get you out,” I said. “You got yourself in, you can get yourself—Hey! Quit that!”

Because my cat was squirming around behind the books and pushing them onto the floor, where they made quiet thudding noises as they hit the area rug.

“Did you really have to?” I asked, crouching down to pick up Ansel Adams’s Yosemite and the Range of Light (Rafe’s), the Oxford Atlas of the World (a Christmas present to us from Rafe’s parents), and The Art of Robert Bateman (mine). “And by that I mean crawling back there at all, let alone . . . Okay, that’s enough already.”

“Mrr!” Eddie squirmed out through the gap he’d created, used my shoulder as a launching pad, and thundered up the stairs.