The first weight comes off the pile with a clang. It’s small and wants to roll. I bat it back with my paws and push it onto the counter. Then the next. The one after that is heavy. I push it too hard and it slides off the freezer onto the floor, with a leaden thunk that seems to shake the world. We are both as still as death. I listen. It’s difficult through the shrieking drone in my ears. Lauren’s breath shudders in and out. In the next room, Ted snores. He’s still sleeping, I say, weak with relief.

After a moment Lauren says. “Don’t drop them, OK, Olivia?”

No, I whisper. I won’t. I’m very, very careful after that. The last weight, the one at the bottom of the pile, is so heavy that it hurts my paws to push it. Each inch is a miserable struggle. But at last it slides onto the countertop, clunking against the others.

They’re all off, I say.

“All right,” she says. “I’m coming.”

I close my eyes tight and make a sad little row. For some reason I am afraid. What will she be like?

You know, Lauren, I say, eyes still tightly closed, I don’t think I have ever even seen you in real life. Isn’t that weird? We have kind of always taken it in turns being out here, I guess!

There is no answer.

I hear the freezer begin to open, slowly, effortful, as if the hand that lifts the lid is shaking and fragile. I hear the lid thud against the wall. There is wet stirring, a sigh. The stench of misery and terror comes in waves. I think of white thin hands like claws and flesh shiny with scars. It makes me want to row and curl up in a ball.

Come on, cat, I tell myself sternly. Don’t make things worse for the poor girl.

I open my eyes. The freezer lies open, a dark grave. I stand on two hind legs and peer into the depths.

It is empty.

Oooooooeeeee, goes the whine.

Where are you? I whisper. Something is very badly wrong. The whining in my head rises to a scream, and I row and claw my head. I want to run headfirst into a wall, just to make it stop.

“Hey, cat,” Lauren says, next to my ear. The screaming rises. Through it I can hear my breath, my heart chopping like an axe on a block.

“Olivia,” she says, “try not to freak out.”

What in heavens, I say. I’m going insane … Why aren’t you in the freezer?

“I was never in there,” she says.

I can feel her, somehow, the warm outline of her, or smell her maybe. Or maybe there’s no word yet invented for the sense I am using. I’m on the very knife-edge of losing my mind.