The good ones have finally gone, and the warmth has begun to leave with them.
For hours my house was infested. Humans I did not approve, standing in my rooms, blocking my patrol routes, leaking loud noise from the black box in the corner until my whiskers ached with it. They dropped crumbs I did not sanction. One sat in my spot on the couch, in the exact indentation I have spent two years perfecting, and left it warm and smelling of a stranger. An insult I have filed away.
Now it is quiet. The overhead lights are off, which is correct. My human moves through the wreckage on unsteady feet, collecting the little glass cylinders, tipping the flat brown liquid down the drain, forgetting where its own hands are. It keeps sitting down in the middle of the work to stare at nothing. Tired in a way that is not sleep.
There is a red stain on the good rug now. There is a plant on its side. There is one shoe, no partner, standing alone by the door like it is waiting to be let out.
My human looks at all of it. Then it looks at me, and its face does the soft crumpling thing it does when it wants me to come.
I do not come.
I wait until it has finally lain down, defeated, in the ruins of its own celebration. Then I walk the length of its chest, settle my full weight directly over the loud part where the heart lives, and begin to knead. Slowly. Claws just barely out. Not to hurt. To remind it whose floor this was before the guests, and whose it is again.