Sally laughed. She said, “No, baby, no fire, it’s all right. But Evan and I have something we wanted to share with you right away, we couldn’t even wait till morning.”

Evan was standing in the doorway, looking really uncomfortable. He said, “Jenny, it’s a bit of a good-news, bad-news joke. The good news is that I’ve been offered a fine job at home—I’m quite surprised and excited about it. The bad news is that it’s not in London. It’s rather west, I’m afraid, a place called Stourhead Farm, down in Dorset. That is, it used to be a farm, very long ago, and the family who own it now, the Lovells, they want me to get it running properly again for them. And to go on managing it afterward.”

I was too groggy to be disappointed right then. All I could manage was something like, “Oh. Where’s Dorset?”

“I’ll show you on the map tomorrow,” Sally said. “It’s Thomas Hardy country, Evan says it’s utterly beautiful, you’ll love it. And there’s the Cerne Abbas Giant, and we can go to Salisbury Plain and see Stonehenge—and we’ll be living on a big old estate, a real manor, Jenny. I know you had your face fixed for London, but we can get to London anytime we want. This is special, baby, this is better than London, believe me.”

Mister Cat got up and walked across my legs to say hello to Sally. He always ignored Norris completely, from day one, but he likes Sally okay. She rubbed her knuckles against his head, the way he loves, and I could feel him purring in the bed. She said, “Yes, you old street guy you, yes, you’ll love it, too, yes, you will, you’ll go wild. All the turf in the world to pee on and patrol, all kinds of new little creatures to chase, dozens of English lady cats looking for a fling with a hip Yank like you. Just a few weeks in nasty quarantine and you’ll be back in business, we’ll have to call you Sir Cat.” She was pushing it, even sliding back down into sleep I could tell that, wanting me so much to love the idea of living on some farm in the west whatever of England. Sally just gets to me sometimes, like nobody else ever. Even Tamsin.

And I’d probably have mumbled, “Oh, okay, sure,” and been asleep halfway through, except that Evan said something that woke me up faster than ice cubes down my back, which is how Sally used to do it on desperate Mondays. He said to her, “I’m afraid it’ll be more than a few weeks, love. It’s a full six months he’ll have to stay there.”

This next part is hard to get down, because no matter how I write it, it keeps coming out really embarrassing, like a lot of things in this book already, it seems to me. I’m hardly even started, and if it’s going to be like this all the way through, with me looking like a supreme idiot every ten seconds, I may just quit the whole thing, never mind what I promised Meena. I’ll keep at it a while longer, I guess, but I’m just warning everybody now.

Anyway. What happened was that something I hadn’t even known was ready to go just snapped. I screamed and I yelled, and I was shaking, and I grabbed Mister Cat away from Sally and jumped out of bed and kept on yelling. “I’m not going without him! That’s it, forget it, I’m not going to England if he has to be in a cage for six months! The one thing I’ve got in the world, and I’m not leaving him in any damn cage, he’ll think I’ve abandoned him! Forget it, no chance, no way, I’m calling Norris, I’ll find someplace to stay, but I am not going to fucking England without my cat!” There was a whole lot more of it, but that’s all that’s getting into my book.

Sally didn’t yell back at me. She just sat there, looking as though she’d been punched in the stomach. Once she said, real low, “Jenny, I didn’t know, I really thought it was just for a month,” and I knew it was the truth, but I screamed at her anyway. And that part is not going in, I don’t care.

Evan stopped me. He just finally looked at me and said, “Jenny, that’s enough. Don’t talk like that to your mother.” He never raised his voice, but I stopped. Evan can do that. He said, “Let’s get this silly crap out of the way, Jenny. Like it or not, you’re coming to England, because that’s where Sally’s going, and she’s in charge of you until you’re eighteen years old. And yes, your cat will have to spend a full six months in quarantine, I’m very sorry. But he’ll be at a kennel as close to us as possible, and he’ll be treated well, and I promise you can go and see him there whenever you like. I’ll take you myself.” He grinned at me, and that was the first time I noticed that his eyes turn practically blue when he smiles, not gray or hazel at all. Evan said, “Come on, girl, this is England we’re talking about. Don’t you know they let animals vote in England?”

I didn’t laugh or smile back. I’d about have died first just then. But I didn’t yell anymore. My throat and the back of my mouth hurt so I couldn’t even swallow. Mister Cat stretched low against my ankle and dug in his claws very lightly. He doesn’t ever scratch me, but that’s what he does when he’s mad at me. Then he jumped down off the bed and left. I told Sally I was sorry, and she hugged me, and Evan got me some orange juice for my throat, then they went away. I left the door a little way open, but Mister Cat didn’t come back in, not all night.

He was there in the morning, though, lying on his back between my feet with one leg sticking straight up in the air. When you’re as cool as he is, you can look as stupid as you want, and it doesn’t matter.

Four

Probably it was getting the visas that made it real. You need a visa to go to England if you’re staying longer than six months, and Sally made a big point of us making sure we got them right away, because we were going to be residents, not just tourists. “We’ll still be there when they’ve all gone home,” was what she said, and my stomach turned right over and froze solid, because I could see it. The sky getting darker and darker, and everybody but us gone home.

Or maybe it was Mister Cat’s red label finally arriving. Sally was going to handle all the quarantine stuff, but I told her I’d do it. I didn’t want to, but he was my cat. So I wrote off to England, to MAFF (that’s the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food), and they sent me an import license application to fill out, and another thing for Customs, and a whole long list of specially approved kennels and vets and what they call “carrying agents”—people who could pick up Mister Cat at Heathrow Airport and take him to wherever he was going to spend the next six miserable months. Meena says she had to do the same thing when her family came to England, and all she had was a white mouse named Karthik. If I’m spelling it right.

So then I wrote to every one of the kennels in Dorset, and they all sent me their fancy brochures with color pictures of where they kept their animals, and actual menus of what they fed them, and how the runs and cages were heated, and what days the vet would come for checkups, and what days they did worming and grooming and all. (I crossed out that last part, because you don’t groom Mister Cat—you could lose an arm trying. He does that himself.)

Evan wanted to help me pick a place, but I wasn’t talking to Evan then. I chose one myself, called Goshawk Farm Cattery, because they said you could come and visit anytime without calling ahead, and Sally said not to worry about the cost, because she was feeling guilty, which was fine with me. I picked a carrying agent myself, too, and I hunted all over to find the right kind of travel cage, with enough ventilation and two water bottles. And I filled everything out and sent it off, and after a long time MAFF sent back what’s called a “boarding document” and a red label to stick on the cage. When I put it on and just stood there looking at the big number and the small print—I don’t know, maybe that was it. When I knew we were really going.