Maya was already late, and honestly, she wasn't sure she minded. The blind date at a wine bar on Larimer Street had been her sister Rachel's idea, and Rachel pursued matchmaking with the single-minded focus of a woman who couldn't stand seeing anyone alone. "He's forty-four, divorced, works in structural engineering, doesn't smoke. Just have one drink, Maya." One drink she could've had on her own couch. But arguing with Rachel was like trying to explain to a cat why the printer wasn't a bed. The cat, for the record, was currently perched on top of the bookshelf, watching.
Biscuit had a gift for showing up exactly where he wasn't wanted and staring with an expression that suggested he'd seen everything and was mildly unimpressed. Maya pulled on the green wrap dress she hadn't worn since her coworker's wedding two summers ago and turned in front of the mirror in the hallway. Biscuit blinked once, unhurried.
"Well? Do I look okay?"
The cat hopped down and padded toward the front door without answering. Maya took that as a verdict. She swiped on lipstick, grabbed her bag, stepped into her heels by the door, and reached for the deadbolt.
The door swung open. And in that same instant, an orange blur shot between her ankles.
Biscuit. He hit the hallway landing, paused half a second to survey his options, then took off down the stairwell like something that knew exactly where it was headed.
"Biscuit! No!"
Biscuit did not care for "no." Maya dropped her purse, kicked off her heels, and ran after him in her socks. Fourth floor. Third. A sharp turn where she nearly slammed into the railing, grabbed it just in time, and skidded on the tile in her sock feet before catching her balance.
"I am begging you," she yelled down the stairwell.
Biscuit was not moved by begging.
Down on the ground floor, the elevator dinged — that old, wheezing elevator in her building that sounded like it resented every trip. The doors slid open, and a man stepped out. Tall, broad-shouldered, carrying a cardboard box under one arm.
And a cat launched itself directly at his chest.
No warning. No introduction. Biscuit landed against the man's flannel shirt, dug his claws in for balance, pressed his face into the guy's jaw, and let out a long, theatrical meow.
The man froze. Looked down at the cat. Then looked up at Maya, who at that exact moment came stumbling onto the landing — flushed, hair falling out of its clip, dressed for a date, wearing mismatched wool socks with cartoon foxes on them.
A beat of silence.
"Is this… yours?" he asked.
"Mine," Maya panted, hands on her knees. "That's my cat. He got out. I'm so sorry."
The man nodded slowly. Biscuit kept purring into his collarbone, showing zero interest in getting down.
"Does he do this a lot?"
"Never. He usually won't even come to me on the first try."
The man laughed — a real laugh, low and easy. Biscuit's purring got louder, like he'd been waiting for that exact reaction.
"I'm Ethan," he said, shifting the box to his other hip. "Just moved in. Unit 2B."
"Maya. 4C."
"Neighbors, then."
"Neighbor," she corrected, reaching for the cat.
Biscuit glanced at her outstretched hands, considered his options, and buried his face further into Ethan's neck.
"Wow. Thanks," Maya told the cat. "Traitor."
Ethan scratched behind Biscuit's ear like it was second nature. "Maybe he just needs a minute."
"He needs a diet, is what he needs. Long story."
They stood there in the stairwell, the cat rumbling contentedly, Ethan cradling him with one hand under his belly and the other bracing his back — the hold of someone who'd done this before.
"Did you have cats?" Maya asked.
"One. Orange, actually, kind of like this guy. Had him seven years, then I moved for a job in Denver and my parents kept him. Miss him more than I expected to."
Maya looked at Biscuit, eyes half-closed in blissful surrender against a stranger's shoulder. Then at Ethan. Then at her phone, buzzing in her bag on the fourth-floor landing she'd abandoned.
The date. The wine bar on Larimer. The structural engineer with no bad habits.
She dug her phone out of her bag, which she'd doubled back to grab, and typed with one thumb: *Rach, I'm not coming. Emergency. Cat escaped.*
Rachel's reply came back in seconds: *ARE YOU KIDDING ME. Because of the CAT?*
*Yes. Because of the cat. I'll explain later.*
She put the phone away.
"So, Ethan. I know this is a strange way to meet. But since your first five minutes in this building involved an assault by cat — can I offer you coffee upstairs? Least I can do."
Ethan looked at Biscuit. Biscuit looked at Ethan. Something had clearly been decided between the two of them in the last three minutes.
"Coffee sounds good," he said. "Let me just drop this box off first."
That was the easy part — the part that felt, later, almost too neat, like the opening scene in a story someone else had written for her. What came after wasn't as smooth.
Coffee turned into two hours, because Maya's coffee maker was broken and they ended up drinking instant out of mismatched mugs while Biscuit refused to leave Ethan's lap, kneading a hole into his jeans. They talked about nothing — his job managing renovations on old warehouse buildings downtown, her job doing billing for a pediatric clinic, the fact that neither of them liked their upstairs neighbor's taste in music. It was easy in a way dates never were. No performance to it.
For three weeks after that, it stayed easy. Coffee turned into dinner, dinner turned into Sunday mornings on Maya's fire escape with bagels from the place on Colfax, into Ethan fixing the wobbly cabinet door in her kitchen because he "couldn't stand watching it swing." Biscuit adopted him fully, waiting by the door on the days he knew — somehow always knew — that Ethan was coming over.
Then, on a Tuesday in early October, everything tilted.
Maya came home from work to find Ethan sitting on her front steps instead of upstairs in 2B, his phone face-down on his knee, jaw tight in a way she hadn't seen on him before.
"Hey," she said, sitting down beside him. "What's wrong?"
He didn't answer right away. He turned the phone over, unlocked it, and handed it to her. A text thread. A woman named Priya. *I need to see you. I'm not asking anymore. You owe me that much after everything.*
"Who's Priya?"
"My ex-wife." He rubbed his palms on his knees. "We split two years ago. I told you that. What I didn't tell you is she's been calling for a month. She lost her job in June, she's behind on rent, and she thinks — she's decided — that I owe her money. A lot of it. Twelve thousand dollars, she says, from when I bought her out of the house we owned together."
"Did you? Owe her that?"
"No. I paid her exactly what the settlement said — eighteen thousand, two years ago, wired the day the papers were final. I have every record. But she's convinced I lowballed the house value, and now she's saying she'll go to a lawyer, make it ugly, unless I just 'take care of it' quietly."
Maya sat with that for a second, the October wind pulling a few dead leaves across the sidewalk in front of them.
"So take care of it. The right way. Not the quiet way."
Ethan looked at her.
"I mean it," Maya said. "You don't owe her twelve thousand dollars because she's decided you do. You owe her the paperwork that proves what you already paid. That's it."
Three days later, Priya showed up at the building. Not upstairs — right there on the sidewalk in front of the stoop, at six in the evening, when Maya was walking home from the bus stop with a grocery bag digging into her wrist. A woman in a camel coat, arms crossed, clearly waiting.
"You're the new one," Priya said, not as a question.
"I'm Maya. Can I help you with something?"
"You can tell your boyfriend I'm done waiting. He knows what he owes me."
Ethan came down the front steps at that exact moment — Biscuit had alerted him, oddly, pacing at the window like he always did when someone unfamiliar lingered too long outside. He stopped two steps up, looking at his ex-wife with none of the panic Maya had expected and all of the calm she hadn't.
"Priya. I told you Monday. I'll email you the settlement documents and the wire confirmation from the sale. Tonight."
"I don't want documents. I want the money."
"You got the money. Eighteen thousand dollars, June of 2024, into the account you gave me. If you think the house was undervalued, that's a conversation for a lawyer and an appraiser, not a conversation you have on the sidewalk."
Priya's mouth opened, then closed. She looked at Maya, like she expected an ally, and found nothing there but a woman holding a bag of groceries who clearly wasn't going to flinch either.
"You'll regret not just settling this like an adult," Priya said, and walked to her car.
Ethan didn't chase her. He didn't call after her. He went inside, opened his laptop at Maya's kitchen table while Biscuit supervised from the windowsill, and pulled up the folder he'd kept since the divorce — bank statements, the notarized settlement agreement, the wire transfer confirmation with the date and the amount in bold. He forwarded the whole folder to Priya's email with one line: *Everything you need is attached. I'm not sending anything further.* Then he forwarded a copy to his own lawyer, just so there'd be a record that he had.
Priya never wrote back. Three weeks later, Ethan got a letter from her attorney — not a lawsuit, just a formal notice that the matter was "under review." Six months on, it went nowhere, because there was nowhere for it to go: the numbers were the numbers, dated and signed.
Maya still has the wine bar reservation confirmation somewhere in her email, unused, from a date she never showed up to. Biscuit still waits by the door on Tuesdays, when Ethan's schedule brings him home early, tail up like an antenna, and refuses, to this day, to let Maya pick him up first.
