The Cat Video He Never Rewatched

The cat was the thing that kept us together. Not Rohan. The cat.

When his job moved him three hundred miles north that spring, we promised each other it was temporary. Six months, a year at most, then one of us would close the gap. In the meantime there were the videos. Every day, sometimes twice a day, my phone would buzz with ten silly seconds of his tabby, Biscuit, doing nothing in particular. Biscuit knocking a pen off the desk. Biscuit yelling at a pigeon through the window. Biscuit asleep in a sunbeam with one paw over her face.

I saved every single one. On the bad nights, when the distance felt like a physical weight on my chest, I would scroll through them like a photo album. They were proof that there was a real apartment, a real life, a real him, somewhere out there waiting for me to arrive. They were the most ordinary little gifts and I treasured them more than anything he'd ever bought me.

That Thursday he sent one captioned *she thinks the bed is hers now lol.* I watched it on the train home, smiling before it even started. Biscuit leapt up onto his duvet, turned a tight circle, and the camera followed her, panning across the headboard, across the nightstand, before it cut off.

I almost didn't catch it. I watched it three more times before I let myself believe what was sitting there on the nightstand, in focus for maybe half a second. A bottle. A coil of black leather with a worn handle, the kind of thing you don't mistake for a belt.

We had never owned anything like that. We had never even talked about it. And we had not been in the same room, the same city, the same anything, in nearly two months.

I felt the floor of my stomach drop out. I sat very still on that train, watching strangers' reflections in the dark window, while my brain quietly rearranged every late reply, every early night, every weekend he'd said he was too tired to call.

I called him that evening. I didn't shout. I just described the nightstand to him, item by item, in a flat voice, like I was reading off a receipt. I heard him breathe. I heard him start three different sentences and abandon all of them. He tried *it's not what it looks like.* He tried *that's old, from before us.* He tried, finally, *you're being insane about a video of my cat,* and that was the one that ended it, because we both heard how desperate it sounded.

Biscuit had given him up without meaning to. A creature with no concept of secrets, photographed by a man who'd forgotten that cameras see the whole room.

I never asked who she was. It didn't matter. What gutted me wasn't the bottle or the leather. It was that for two months I'd been falling asleep clutching little videos of a life I thought was mine, and someone else had been standing just outside the frame the whole time.

I still have all the clips. I haven't been able to delete them. But I never opened the last one again.