Grant heard the noise on the second night in the rental house. The first night, he’d been too exhausted from the move, from thinking about what had once been his marriage, and from the beer Peter had declined after helping him with the big furniture, and he’d slept like a dead man. Grant always slept fine his first night in any new place; it was the second night that always got him.

He stayed up, trying to tire himself again with putting away his clothes into his new closet and then setting up his desk in the bedroom he was going to use as an office. As he plugged in the laptop he heard something strange.

Grant went from room to room, searching for the sound: partly a shuffling, partly a light padding on surfaces too carpeted to make the proper sound of footfalls. Maybe it was the weird silence of a house without a TV chattering alone in another room, or the last two beers he’d drank instead of eating dinner. Maybe it was mice.

He found nothing, and he went to bed too late, locking his bedroom door behind him.

He heard the noise when he stepped out of his morning shower, but daylight suggested it was nothing more than the house settling or, more likely, rodents. His parents’ house had once had squirrels in the walls until his father had put down poison. For months afterward, Grant had not been able to go near any of the walls without thinking of dead squirrels rotting slowly just inches away.

The noise was louder that night but the next day was Saturday and Grant spent the morning at the animal shelter convincing the volunteers on duty that he desperately wanted the companionship that only a cat could bring. When they took him to the cat enclosure his eyes settled on a tortoiseshell named Mandy, and with a “donation” to the shelter, he had a solution to the mice.

Grant took Mandy home, showed her the litter box and the food dish, petted her on the head, and left to buy a TV center and a table. Then he bought groceries and came home to find that Mandy hadn’t taken to the litter box lesson. He yelled at her and then cleaned up.

Instead of installing the table as he needed to do, Grant bought some cheap takeout for dinner and spent the evening in his office. He’d been working on this novel for three years, and now was as good a time as any to make a fresh start on it. New life, new beginning. Yes.

He forced himself to delete the last chapter, which he knew was crap anyway. He spent the next hour staring at the blank screen and the rest of the night writing, rewriting, and ultimately deleting one long paragraph. When he finally went to bed, he shut the door, leaving Mandy out of the bedroom. An hour later she woke him with her forlorn mewling.

As he opened the door, Mandy dashed in, then jumped up on his bed and settled in, expressing with a swish of her tail the firm belief that she was doing him a favor. Grant glared at her, thinking she’d get along just fine with Donna.

Another hour, and he woke up to hear her meowing again. Exhausted, he shouted at the damned cat to shut up already, when his hand brushed her fur, rising and falling slowly with each sleepy breath. Dream, prompted his brain, and he agreed.