"Before we agree to that," Daniel said, "can we look at the second version?"
A tail rose behind Nina's laptop.
Nina was looking at the second version. She had put a small pencil mark beside the part she wanted to discuss and had rehearsed an opening sentence while the kettle boiled. Neither preparation included an orange tail.
"Nina," said Priya. "You've got company."
Arthur stepped around the back of the screen. His whiskers appeared first, then his white chin, then a front paw placed precisely where Nina had intended to put her notes.
She slid the notebook six inches to the left.
"Sorry. What was the question?"
Daniel repeated it without the opening clause. Nina found her pencil mark. Arthur continued across the desk at a pace that suggested nobody had asked him to hurry.
The morning had been going reasonably well. It was raining lightly outside the apartment, her socks matched, and the meeting had started with everyone able to hear everyone else. Arthur had spent the first ten minutes on the broad arm of the chair behind her. Nina had seen him there when she sat down and assumed that was where he would remain.
That assumption had lasted until the second version.
He stopped beside the closed stationery tray, facing the window. The desk was wide enough for the laptop, Nina's papers, and a cat who didn't intend to help. She moved her elbow so he could turn without stepping on the notebook.
"He's Arthur," she said.
"We met last month," Priya said. "I think I only saw his ear."
Nina had no recollection of this. Arthur, who could now be seen from the shoulders up, washed the edge of one paw.
Daniel shared the other version.
The tail disappeared.
For a moment, Nina thought Arthur had gone back to his chair. Then the laptop camera showed her an orange shoulder beside her own. He had settled at the far end of the desk, just inside the frame.
She gave her prepared sentence. It sounded less elegant aloud than it had beside the kettle, but it got them to the right page. Priya disagreed with part of it. Daniel asked where the revised paragraph would go.
Nina drew an arrow in her notebook.
Arthur watched the pencil.
She stopped drawing.
His eyes stopped too.
Nina set the pencil beside the notebook and used the trackpad with her other hand. Arthur looked toward the window, where rain was catching on the glass. They returned to the paragraph.
"Could we keep the first sentence?" Daniel asked.
"Yes," said Nina, who was already writing that down.
Her pencil had rolled beneath the notebook's curled cover. She flattened the cover, found it, and wrote a hurried note that began with a very large Y.
Arthur lowered his chin to the desk.
Without looking away from the screen, Nina shifted her notebook again. The page now hung a little over her knee. It was an awkward place to write, but moving the laptop would have meant moving the charging cable, and she had finally arranged the cable so nothing dangled.
They settled the first sentence. They settled the last one. The bit in the middle remained troublesome.
On screen, Priya pushed her glasses up and said, "Can you read it once without explaining what it's supposed to mean?"
Nina read it.
There was a pause.
"Oh," Nina said.
Daniel laughed. Just once, enough for Nina to laugh too. Arthur lifted his head at the sound, looked from her mouth to the laptop, and lowered it again.
They cut seven words. Nina crossed out her arrow and drew a shorter one.
From somewhere outside the room came the soft clunk of the building's pipes. Arthur stood, stretched one front leg, and stepped down onto the chair arm. His tail passed in front of Nina's shoulder on the way out of the camera's view.
"Bye, Arthur," Priya said.
"He's not available for follow-up questions," Nina told her.
"Neither am I after eleven," Daniel said. "Shall we finish?"
After the last goodbye
When the call ended, Nina left the notebook on her lap for a moment. Her shoulder had stiffened while she wrote around the cat. She rolled it once, put both feet on the floor, and brought the notebook back to the desk.
The notes made sense, mostly. A large Y, two arrows, a sentence with seven words crossed out. At the bottom she had written something that might have been "send before lunch" or "second version."
She would need to check.
Arthur had left three orange hairs beside the stationery tray. Nina pinched them together and reached for the small wastebasket under the desk.
Then she reached for her pencil.
It wasn't beside the notebook. It wasn't in the tray. She lifted the page, checked beneath the laptop's edge, and patted the pocket of her sweatshirt.
Arthur was already in the hallway, walking toward the kitchen.
Nina lifted the notebook once more. The pencil fell out of the curled cover and landed across the large Y.
Editor's note: Nina and Arthur belong to a fictional composite of familiar work-at-home moments. The accompanying AI-created scene illustrations do not depict a documented household.
