Nine minutes. That's what the departure board said when Marcus Webb checked his phone for the third time in two minutes, standing on the platform at Union Station in Chicago with his duffel bag already slung over his shoulder.
"Dani, we need to go. Now."
Danielle Foster wasn't listening. She'd stopped by a bench near the newsstand, where two black kittens — brothers, maybe eight weeks old — were tumbling over each other in a patch of sun that cut through the station's high windows. One had a torn left ear. The other kept batting at a crumpled Starbucks receipt like it owed him money.
"Dani. Train's at 9:47. If we miss the connection in Milwaukee we lose the whole first day in the cabin."
She didn't answer. She set her tote bag down on the bench and crouched.
People streamed past them toward the gates — a guy in scrubs checking his watch, a woman dragging a rolling suitcase with a busted wheel that screamed against the tile every few feet, a group of college kids arguing about whether they'd already missed the Amtrak to Detroit. Nobody looked at the kittens. Or they looked, and then looked away fast, the way you look away from a guy asking for change.
"They've been here three days," said the man restocking the newsstand's magazine rack, not really talking to anyone. "Somebody dumped 'em by the loading dock Tuesday. Mama cat took off Thursday morning. Ain't seen her since."
Marcus checked the departure board again. Eight minutes.
"Dani, seriously. We are not doing this today."
"Doing what?" She looked up at him, and one kitten — the one with the torn ear — climbed straight into her lap like he'd been waiting his whole short life for exactly that lap to show up.
"You know what. Last time it was that dog outside the vet clinic. The one that cost us four hundred and change in shots and a crate we still have sitting in the garage."
"His name was Biscuit, and he's living a good life in Naperville right now with the Hendersons."
"That's not the point—"
"His people don't call him Biscuit anymore. He's got a good life."
"That's not the point, Dani, and you know it." Marcus lowered his voice, because a station security guard had drifted closer, curious. "We're going to Michigan for six days. We can't bring cats. We can't leave cats. This is a bad idea at a bad time."
Danielle picked up the second kitten. Now she had one in each arm, and both of them had started purring loud enough that the newsstand guy laughed.
"My aunt Rosalind used to say black cats bring bad luck," Marcus tried, quieter now, almost embarrassed to be saying it out loud on platform 9 of a train station in front of God and everybody. "She wouldn't let one in her house. Ever."
"Your aunt Rosalind also thought microwaves gave you cancer, Marcus."
"I'm just saying — "
"What are you saying? That these two are cursed because of their fur color?" Danielle stood up, a kitten in each arm, and for the first time that morning she actually looked mad instead of just distracted. "They're eight weeks old. Their mom's gone. It's ninety-one degrees out here by noon and there's no water source for them within two blocks except whatever's leaking out of that AC unit."
The security guard, a heavyset man named Terrence who'd worked the Union Station beat for eleven years, finally spoke up. "Ma'am, station doesn't really allow us to — I mean, we can't have animals loose in the—"
"I know," Danielle said. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm handling it."
Six minutes.
Marcus ran both hands through his hair, the way he did when he was about to lose an argument and knew it. "Dani. The train. Please."
And here's the thing nobody puts in the brochure about Danielle Foster: she'd grown up in a house in Gary, Indiana where her mother fostered rescue dogs for a shelter that never had enough space, where there was always a crate in the hallway and a smell of wet fur by the back door that never fully went away no matter how much Fabuloso her mom used on the floors. Danielle had bottle-fed three litters of kittens before she was twelve. She knew, in a way that lived somewhere below language, that you don't leave.
"Marcus." Her voice had gone flat and certain. "You go. Get on the train. I'll catch the 11:15."
"I'm not leaving you at a train station in Chicago with two feral kittens."
"They're not feral, they're abandoned. There's a difference."
He exhaled through his nose, the sound he made instead of swearing in public. Then he looked at the kitten with the torn ear, who had stopped purring and was now staring up at him with two enormous, unblinking green eyes, like he understood every word and was simply waiting to see how this particular human would land.
"Fine," Marcus said. "Fine. But we need a box. Or a carrier. Something. We can't put them in your tote bag."
"There's a Walgreens two blocks up on Canal."
"The train leaves in five minutes, Dani."
"Then we catch the next one."
That's the part of the story that doesn't usually get told right, because most people assume the drama is the moment somebody decides to save an animal. It isn't. The real drama is everything after — the four days it took to find out the kittens, whom Danielle named Ash and Ember, both had ringworm and needed to be quarantined in the guest bathroom of their apartment in Rogers Park; the seven hundred and thirty dollars the emergency vet visit cost because Ember had a respiratory infection that turned into something worse over that first weekend; the fact that they missed the Michigan trip entirely and ate the four-hundred-dollar nonrefundable deposit on the cabin because Marcus, despite everything he'd said on that platform, refused to leave two sick kittens with a pet sitter he didn't know.
Three weeks later, Marcus's aunt Rosalind came over for Sunday dinner, took one look at Ash asleep on the back of the couch with his torn ear twitching, and said, without missing a beat, "Well, he's not so bad, is he."
Marcus didn't say anything. He just picked up his phone, still sitting on the coffee table with the banking app open from where he'd been checking the balance after covering the vet bill, and set it face-down.
Danielle came in from the kitchen carrying two mugs of coffee, one for herself and one — out of habit, still, after everything — for a mother cat who was never coming back for these two. She handed one mug to Rosalind instead.
"They're not bad luck," Danielle said. "They're just cats."
Ember, from the windowsill, knocked a pen off the desk and watched it roll under the radiator with the focused satisfaction of an animal who had never once, in his short life, felt unwanted in this room.
