The days settled into an easy rhythm. Morning tea on the back steps while Nina bounded through the grass like a wind-up toy. Lazy afternoons spent stretched out in warm patches of sunlight. At night, Lisa would drift off to the kitten’s soft, steady breathing curled against her ribs. And then, one morning, that rhythm broke.
The sky was the kind of cloudless blue that made you forget storms were even possible. Lisa stood barefoot on the patio, hands wrapped around a cup of mint tea, her gaze wandering between the dandelions and the treeline. Nina had darted out moments earlier, chasing something—maybe a moth, maybe a leaf, maybe nothing at all—that only she could see.
Lisa smiled faintly. “Don’t go too far,” she said without thinking. A breeze rustled the trees. She turned to the table to grab her phone, just to check the time. And then… silence. No meow. No quick, pattering footsteps across the patio. No soft chime from the bell on her collar.
Only the lazy sway of branches in the wind. Lisa’s brow furrowed. “Nina?” she called. No answer. She stepped to the edge of the grass, where the yard dipped toward a scruffy line of bushes that marked the border with the neighbour’s overgrown lot. “Nina!” she tried again, louder now. Nothing. She crouched. “Sweetheart?”
She clicked her tongue and waited. A faint rustle came from the brush—then quiet. Could’ve been a squirrel. Or the wind. Or something else entirely. Lisa moved along the fence line, looking under shrubs, behind flowerpots, even glancing up into the branches overhead.
But the yard felt frozen, like a still photograph—silent, empty. Just like that, Nina was gone. Lisa didn’t panic, not at first. Cats vanish all the time. They slip into sheds, hide under porches, or curl up in places you’d never think to check. That’s what she told herself as she searched the yard again, and again, and again.
With each pass, though, her voice grew tighter. By mid-afternoon, she’d scoured every corner of her property, knocked on neighbours’ doors, and even crawled beneath her deck, knees scraping against gravel and damp leaves. Still no Nina. Not a jingle, not a tuft of fur, not even a pawprint in the soft mud by the garden.
What unsettled her most was the stillness. If there had been a struggle—a noise, a crash, anything—she could have reacted. But there had been nothing. No cry, no thud, not even a bent stem in the flowerbed. Just the wind and the pounding of her own heartbeat in her ears. That night, she barely slept, keeping the back door cracked open and a bowl of food waiting on the patio.