Steph had no idea how they were going to tell Dr. Phelps that her cat was dead.
They had just finished cleaning up the kitchen. A plastic grocery store bag spilled open into the doorway–trash, an empty glass bottle, a ripped foil wrapper, a mess of wet latex. Steph felt weird about throwing it away here, in the nicer, cleaner suburban dumpsters, where it would later mingle with empty organic juice containers and fliers announcing middle school lacrosse practice schedules.
And the cat. Sylvie. Wrapped up in the quilt in the center of the floor. Steph didn’t know where to put her yet.