I got about ten feet into the crowd before I realized I didn’t actually know what I meant to do with the case in my hand. Set it on a table like evidence? Say her name loud enough for strangers to feel something? I watched him from across the lawn, drink in hand, telling some story to people who had no idea what “obsession” meant to him three years ago, and the whole plan I’d rehearsed in the car suddenly felt like it belonged to someone angrier than I currently was.
So instead I just stood at the edge of the picnic, near the drinks table, and let a woman near me ask what was in the case, since it clearly wasn’t sunscreen. I told her, plainly — a cat, ten years old, insulin twice a day, still here three years later because I decided a hassle was worth showing up for. She said her mother had done the same thing for a diabetic dog, called it the easiest hard thing she’d ever committed to. It turned into an actual conversation, not a scene, and by the time he glanced over and clocked me standing there, I was mid-laugh about something entirely unrelated to him.
I left before the picnic ended, case still in hand, never having said a word to him directly. On the drive home I understood that wasn’t cowardice — it was that I’d already answered the question he raised at that dinner three years ago, every morning and every evening since, and I didn’t need him or his coworkers to hear the verdict out loud. She was waiting by the bowl when I got home, same as always, and I gave her the six o’clock shot like I had eleven hundred times before, no audience required.
