And so Piper did. Believe that the cat was Tom—for a few days at least. Long enough to mention something to Pearl that morning in the kitchen of the bed-and-breakfast, which, in retrospect, was what started the whole mess. When she got back home, it wasn’t just the lack of snoring that forced Piper to accept that this cat was not in fact harboring Tom’s late soul. After the cat inhaled the plate of eggs, Piper tried to caress his soft cheek, and the cat promptly scratched her hand and jumped out the open window above the sink. Tom would never have been so rude.
Still, she was sad when the cat left and she was once again alone. So she started leaving the window open and a bowl of milk on the counter to entice him back. And three days later, he returned. He took to sleeping on Tom’s pillow, and it comforted Piper to have another living creature in her space that she could talk to when the loneliness and silence in her house became overwhelming.
She named him Tom. Not because she thought he was Tom. Not anymore, anyway. But because he was a tomcat and she knew it would have made Tom (her husband, not the cat) laugh. And when Tom (the cat, not her husband) was in her house, she was a little less lonely, which was how Tom always made her feel, so maybe she did name him a little bit for Tom. But she thought maybe she could be forgiven for that, too.
“Anyway, that’s all it was,” she continued, ducking her head, unable to meet Anders’s eyes. “A blip. I was grieving and I had a tiny little break with reality that lasted all of about two days. How was I to know Pearl would take it so far?”
Anders stared at her, his jaw so slack, it looked unhinged.
“I know I should have said something, stopped it. But in my defense, I didn’t even realize what was happening until a few days later at the docks. I’d been walking there in the morning and the afternoon, because I thought it might make me feel better to do something that felt routine—and be around people, rather than wallow in my house, which is what I had been doing. Imagine my surprise one day when someone shouted out to Tom! Asked if he had a good haul or something. And then before I knew it, everyone was waving to Tom, and I had no choice but to smile and pretend that he was right there with me.”
“No choice! They were doing it for you. You could have said something.”
“I know,” Piper said, filling with both relief to have said it all out loud and shame at how long she’d let the pretense go on. “But everybody seemed so happy. I didn’t want to take that away from them. And . . . if I’m telling the truth, I guess selfishly, I didn’t want it to end. It was so nice, hearing his name all the time. People smiling at me instead of pitying me.”
Anders’s mouth moved open and closed, searching for words. He finally clamped onto some. “Let me get this straight. This entire time—these past however many months—you’ve been pretending to have had a psychological break?”
Piper flinched at how awful it sounded out loud and she could barely muster the strength to push the word out of her mouth with a puff of air. “Yes?”
“Oh. My. God.” A large purple vein was noticeably pulsing in Anders’s neck and he looked so angry Piper felt the need to defend herself.
“It’s not like it’s been easy!”
“Then why did you do it?”
This was the question Piper dreaded; the one she didn’t have an answer for. Or a good answer, anyway. How to explain that it was easier in a way? Because if she stopped pretending, then she’d have to face the truth: that Tom was really, truly gone. But before she could begin, Anders rounded on her again.
“So wait . . . that time you said Tom was asking you what tie to wear when I was on your porch—you were messing with me?”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “And to be fair, he was color-blind. That part was true.”
“And the marina!” The vein grew larger and more purplish. “I said hi to him! And you knew—”
“Right. I did feel bad about that.”
Anders was silent for a few beats, absorbing it all, and Piper wasn’t sure what to say without making everything even worse. “So why don’t you just tell them the truth? It’s not too late. Or you can just pretend that you’re . . . better or whatever.”
“I don’t know. Every time I think I’m going to, I just can’t.”
“But you have to.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not real!”
Piper got quiet and looked out to the water. Seconds turned into minutes as she tried to put words to how she felt. Finally she said: “It is to me.”
“What?” Anders’s forehead crinkled in genuine confusion. “But you just said—”
Piper put a hand up. “I mean, not the way everyone is pretending—the way I’ve been pretending. But . . . sometimes I swear I can feel him beside me, his breath in my hair. Or I can hear his laughter. I talk to him, too. All the time. When I tell him things, I know exactly how he’d respond”—she felt her voice begin to crack and brought her hands up to
