The Beach
The beach below the town is shingle and tidepools and the smell of iodine. The paw prints reappear in a strip of wet sand, heading along the waterline toward the headland โ toward the lighthouse โ until the shingle takes them and they're gone.
In a tidepool, something glints. You fish it out: a small brass tag, green at the edges, the ring snapped. A cat's collar tag. One side is engraved FOXGLOVE COTTAGE.
You turn it over. The other side gives the name your aunt chose โ for what we lack, she wrote โ and there it is, stamped in the brass, the word the whole town will not say:
THURSDAY.
Somewhere up on the headland, thin and unbothered, a cat meows once.