Allesmarkt

The sauce was from a jar.

She'd had three of them under the cabinet - the same brand she'd been comparing against in the Allesmarkt, which she'd registered at some point on the drive home and then declined to think about further. She opened one now and poured it over the pasta without tasting it first, which she always did, and didn't notice until she was already eating.

Whiskers was on the counter.

He wasn't supposed to be on the counter but the counter looked out over the kitchen and Whiskers had long ago decided that her rules about the counter were suggestions that didn't apply to him. He sat with the particular uprightness of a Maine Coon who knows he is being observed and has made his peace with it, watching her fork move between the bowl and her mouth with an attention that looked almost clinical.

"There was a man," she said.

Whiskers blinked.

"In the store. I dropped my purse." She pushed the pasta around. "He helped."

She said it like it was nothing. Like men helped all the time, like that was just a thing that happened, like she hadn't stood in the next aisle for a full minute after with her heart doing something she didn't have a name for.

Whiskers shifted his weight slightly and said nothing, which was the correct response.

"He seemed nice," she said.

The words sat in the kitchen the way those words always did. Heavy with the specific weight of every previous time she'd said them, or thought them, or let herself believe them. They all seemed nice. That was the whole problem with nice - it didn't cost anything, at the start. Nice was easy. Nice was a door held open and a hand offered and a voice that didn't have edges yet.

Yet.

She set her fork down.

Whiskers watched her with his enormous Maine Coon eyes and she looked back at him and the kitchen was very quiet except for the refrigerator doing whatever refrigerators do at ten o'clock at night.

"His name is Daniel," she said. "He was thinking about diced tomatoes."

Whiskers blinked slowly, the way he did when he was processing something or had simply decided to blink. Either way it felt like acknowledgment.

She picked her fork back up. The pasta had gone slightly cold.

"I'm not going back," she said.

Whiskers looked at the window.

She ate the rest of her pasta standing at the counter.