I think about all those little girls. They must have sung songs too, and had pink barrettes and played games. They must have had families and pets and ideas and they either liked swimming, or didn’t; maybe they were afraid of the dark; maybe they cried when they fell off their bikes. Maybe they were really good at math or art. They would have grown up to do other things—have jobs and dislike apples and get tired of their own children and go on long car rides and read books and paint pictures. Later they would have died in car wrecks or at home with their families or in a distant desert war. But that will never happen, now. They are not even stories with endings, those girls. They are just abandoned under the earth.

I say, I know where he keeps the big knife. He thinks no one knows, but I do.

She holds me tight. “Thank you,” she whispers, and I feel her breath in my fur.

Suddenly I cannot bear to wait. I’ll do it now, today, I say. Enough.

I leap up onto the counter and stand on my hind legs. I open the cupboard. At first I can’t believe my senses. It’s not here, I say. But it must be. I nose in and search the dusty interior. But the knife is gone.

“Oh.” I hear the deep wound of disappointment in her voice and I would do anything to make it better. “Don’t worry about it, Olivia.”

I’ll find it, I tell her. I swear, I’ll find it …

She gives a little sound, and I can tell she’s trying not to cry. But I feel her tears running hot through the fur on my cheeks.

What can I do to make it better? I whisper to her. I’ll do anything.

She sniffs. “You probably can’t,” she says. “You would have to use the hands.”

I’ll try, I whisper even though the thought of it makes me ill.

The cupboard under the stairs is dusty and smells pleasantly of fatty engine oil. There are dusty rugs piled in the corner, a stack of old newspapers, part of a vacuum cleaner, boxes of nails, a beach parasol … My ears are wide and alert, my tail raised with expectation. This is just the kind of place I love. I sniff the delicious trickle of black oil that runs across the floor.

“Focus, Olivia,” Lauren says. “I hid it under those newspapers.”

I nose into them and I smell something that is not newspaper. Bland, smoother. Plastic.

“It’s a cassette tape,” Lauren says. “Pick it up. No, that won’t work, use your hands. You don’t really have paws.” Her frustration rises. “You live in my body. We are a girl. Not a cat. You just have to realize that.”