“Yeah. It feels like you’re eating a tongue,” I said, getting my arm tackled by an orange tabby. “Okay, all right, that’s enough, Murder Mittens.” I pulled the cat off me one claw at a time and Emma beamed at me.

Her phone rang and she picked it up and looked at it. “Oh, hold on, it’s Maddy. Hello?” She listened for a moment. Then she sucked air through her teeth. “That’s what the bumpers are for. Well I’m glad you made it, I was worried. Okay. Okay. I will. Bye.” She hung up.

“She docked it okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, she rammed it kind of hard, but she says the boat is fine.”

“You two are going to be professionals by the time this summer is over.”

“I hope so. It’s been a little stressful.” She picked up Murder Mittens. “I don’t think I really thought this island thing through. It sounded like a good idea at the time but it’s kind of inconvenient. Anyway, it’s only for six weeks and Maddy likes the cottage, so…”

“Where’d you and Maddy meet?” I asked.

She rubbed noses with the kitten. “She’s my foster sister. Her moms took me in when I was fourteen. They were amazing. Put me through nursing school and everything.”

“They adopted you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Why not? Actually, you know what, no. You don’t have to answer that. That’s personal.”

“I don’t mind. I didn’t want to be adopted,” she said. “I wanted my mom to be able to come back for me if she wanted to.”

“Annnnd… did she?”

She paused for a moment. “No. She did not.”

Another kitten crept toward me on its belly. I wiggled my fingers and it pounced on my hand and I picked it up and cradled it while it bit my knuckle.

She tilted her head. “That is adorable. I need to get a picture,” she said, grabbing her phone.

“Hey, you should find me on Instagram,” I said after she took the shot.

“Um…” she said as she set her phone down. “I have a little confession to make. I’ve already seen your Instagram.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. Maddy found you.”

“When?”

“About four minutes into our first Reddit DMs?”

“Okay…” I chuckled. “Well, follow me then so I can follow you back.”

“All right. Also, Maddy found you on LinkedIn too,” she said. “And your dad’s obituary. I’m sorry.”

I paused. “I can’t tell if I should feel violated.”

“She just wanted to make sure you weren’t creepy.”

“Did it help you decide to talk to me?”

“It did, actually.”

“Then I’m glad she did it.”

She smiled. Murder Mittens draped over her arm, languidly. “God, cats are just liquid, aren’t they? I always wanted a cat but we moved too much.”

“Moved for work?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes we couldn’t pay the rent or she was tired of the city we were in. My mom wasn’t really good at sitting still,” she said.

“So why the foster care? Do you mind me asking?”

She shook her head. “No. She’d leave me. It was neglect.”

She said this matter-of-factly, like it didn’t bother her and she was talking about someone else.

Then she laughed a little. “One time when I was eight, my mom left for the weekend, but she didn’t come back. She’d left me twenty dollars, and there was some food in the pantry. But a week went by. Then another week. Then three and the food ran out. When she did this in the winter or the fall, I’d eat at school. I’d always save some of my lunch and take it home so I had something to eat on the weekend, but this time it was the summer. The neighbor had this garden in her yard and I was so hungry that I couldn’t sleep and I went over there in the middle of the night and I dug up her carrots. All of them. I took them home and I ate them for days. I turned orange.” She laughed. “The beta-carotene gave me carotenemia. I thought I was dying. I went to the neighbors and they called 911. That’s how I ended up in foster care the first time. That’s also why I hate carrots.”

I just stared at her. “Where was she?” I asked.

She shrugged, petting the kitten. “I don’t know. She’d gotten a job as a flight attendant, and I’d spent lots of nights alone. But this time she just didn’t come home. I think something happened. Not really sure what. The hospital. Jail.”

“Jail??”

“I think she struggles with some mental health issues sometimes. It gets her in trouble. Anyway, she’d forgotten to pay the phone bill so the phone got shut off a few days after she left and I think she didn’t know how to get in touch with me without telling someone she’d left me alone. She was always really afraid I’d get taken from her.”

“You should have been taken from her,” I said, incredulous.

“She was a single mom, Justin, doing the best she could. She couldn’t afford overnight daycare and I was really independent. Honestly, it was fine 99 percent of the time.”

I shook my head. “Emma… That’s fucked up.”

“I genuinely don’t believe she meant to hurt me. She was doing what she had to do. It was what it was. I’m fine. I turned out okay. I’m happy and I have a good life.”

I blinked at her. “I don’t know how you could forgive someone like that.”

She shrugged again and looked up at me. “Why not forgive? In a world where you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy, Justin. I don’t know what it was like to be her. A single mom at eighteen, no money, no family. She struggled. She still struggles. But she loves me and I never doubted that for a second no matter what she did.”

She went back to playing with the kitten in her arms and I just sat there studying her.

Always choose empathy…

I wish I could do that. I wish I could go on with my life and not hold a grudge against Mom. But I couldn’t forgive her. At least not right now.

After an hour with the kittens, we wrapped things up to eat.