She was on my couch. That wasn't a notable fact anymore.

At some point in the last three weeks it had stopped being something I registered when it happened and become the thing I registered when it didn't. The apartment was different with her in it. Not decorated differently, not louder or quieter. Just different.

Her tail was doing the thing.

---

I'd counted eight times. Not on purpose at first. By the sixth I had a number.

Eight times over three weeks, her tail had ended up on me. The couch cushion next to my leg. The space beside my ankle. Once around the back of my knee when I was sitting on the floor. And once — the one I kept coming back to — she'd been mid-sentence about something on TV and I was half-listening and her tail started toward the cushion, changed direction, and wrapped around my wrist. She didn't break the sentence. She didn't look at it. I watched her face and there was nothing there that said she knew it had happened.

The drawer was the other thing. She'd started keeping a hairbrush in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, right side, about three weeks ago. The first morning I found it I moved it to the counter because I figured she'd forgotten it. She moved it back under the sink that evening. I moved it back to the counter. She moved it back. After the third pass I stopped, which was when I understood the hairbrush had a home and the home was chosen. Same spot every morning. I'd confirmed it four days running. Five now.

Then the questions. She asked things about my job that weren't surface questions. Surface questions about logistics software don't dig. They don't follow up on error cases with a second question. They don't build on a thing you said three days ago in a way that means you were listening then and you're still listening now. She'd been asking things with no use to her for weeks, and somewhere around the third time I watched her face while she waited for the answer I understood the question was the thing she wanted.

Three weeks of evidence. She was in as much trouble as I was.

---

I'm not intuitive about people. I'm intuitive about systems. People have too many variables and they lie and they have bad information about themselves. Asking what someone's thinking gets you a guess about a guess. What works is watching what they do when they're not watching themselves.

She thought she was managing her behavior around me. She wasn't managing her tail. She wasn't managing where the hairbrush went. She wasn't managing what she asked about, because the questions were real and real questions don't get managed the same way. If she'd been managing them she'd have asked better cover questions instead.

Three things pointing the same direction. I wasn't going to call it certainty, but I was comfortable acting on it.

Except I wasn't acting on it.

I was sitting on my couch watching her tail settle against my ankle and not doing anything about it.

The reason was this: she had to get there herself.

Not because I was afraid of what would happen if I said something. Because she'd been running on a specific frame for nine hundred years. I don't know the exact shape of it, but I can see what it looks like from the outside. Frames that old don't move because someone points at the counter-evidence. They move when the person inside them runs out of ways to hold them up. She was getting close. She was staying past her intentions every time she came over. The hairbrush was under the sink. Her tail was warm against my ankle.

I was going to stay very still.

---

"The staging in this one is wrong," she said.

I looked up from my phone.

On the screen someone was standing in a way that was clearly not how a person stands when they're about to be attacked.

"The feet," she said. "They want it to look combat-ready but the weight's on the wrong foot."

"How can you tell from here."

"The shoulder. If the weight were forward the shoulder angle would be different. It's staged."

I watched the scene. Now that she'd said it I couldn't unsee it.

"You've called the staging in the last three episodes."

"It keeps being wrong."

That was unarguable. I went back to my phone.

She fell asleep before the episode ended.

I know when she falls asleep because her tail changes. Awake, it moves in small deliberate adjustments. Asleep, the intention goes. It finds whatever is closest and wraps and stays.

Both hands loose in her lap. The lamp catching the side of her face. Her posture following gravity. Tail around my ankle. Nine hundred years of precise control over every part of herself, and zero control over this.

She had no idea she did it. I wasn't going to tell her.

I went back to my phone. Patient.