Marble was on the armchair when she heard it stop.
Click-click-click, the study had been saying for the last hour — Theo typing something, probably his homework, probably with one finger like he always did. But then: nothing. Marble tilted her head left, her folded ear swiveling forward like a little satellite dish, and held absolutely still.
Not the nothing of sleep. A different nothing. The kind with a question mark at the end.
She dropped from the armchair without a sound — four paws, deliberate as a detective — and stood in the dark hallway with her nose low. Sniff, sniff, sniff. There it was. Hot chocolate. The kind Theo made when he was trying to stay awake and failing.
The hallway was dark except for the thin yellow line under the study door at the far end. Marble padded toward it, keeping close to the wall, where the floorboards never creaked. She had learned that months ago. She knew things about this house that nobody else knew.
She passed the bathroom. A dripping tap went tick, tick, tick into the silence. Not her problem tonight. She filed it away and kept walking.
She passed the laundry basket, which smelled strongly of Theo's football socks. She wrinkled her nose. Also not her problem. She had bigger matters to attend to.
At the study door, Marble stopped and pressed her folded ear to the gap at the bottom. She could hear: the faint electric hum of a laptop. The slow, heavy breathing of someone deeply, accidentally asleep. And one very long, very single note — a keyboard key held down by something. Or someone.
She nudged the door open with one paw, then her nose, then her whole small orange self.
There was Theo. Cheek flat on the keyboard, arms dangling, green sweater rucked up on one side. The screen glowed white in the lamplight, and across it ran a river of letters: gggggggggggggggggggggggg, all the way to the edge and back again, filling up line after line. His hot chocolate sat beside him with a smiley face on the mug. The chocolate had gone cold.
Marble looked at Theo. She looked at the screen. She looked at the keyboard.
She thought for exactly two seconds — which is a long time for a cat — and then she stepped up onto the desk, walked three careful steps, and sat directly on the keyboard. All of her. Paws tucked under, full weight, right on the keys.
The g's stopped. Theo's cheek, suddenly without the warm support of a cat face beneath it, slid sideways. He made a noise like a deflating balloon. Then he opened one eye.
"Marble?"
She looked at him with the particular expression she reserved for extremely obvious situations.
He blinked. He looked at the screen. He looked at the ggggggggggggg's. He rubbed his face and made a sound that was almost a word, then stood up, very slowly, like a person reassembling themselves from several different directions.
Sniff, sniff, sniff — she watched him shuffle down the hallway, bumping gently off the doorframe, heading for bed.
Marble sat on the warm keyboard for exactly four minutes. The keys were the perfect temperature. The lamp made a small, satisfied buzzing sound above her. She blinked once, slowly, at the screen.
Then she followed him down the hall, hopped onto the foot of his bed, and tucked all four paws underneath herself — a perfect, tidy loaf — while Theo's breathing deepened into the real kind of sleep. The good kind. The kind with no question mark.
