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almost a year later, and he refused to consume a morsel of food without my cuddling and adoring him as he chewed.
                  Nobody knew how spoiled Cocinero really was. Nobody . I would’ve died had Lexie or Candace found out that I catered to my pet this way. They already made fun of me for buying the damn thing after Fletcher and I broke up. (I’d spent much of my time with Fletcher complaining about how annoying his giant moose-dog-hybrid was.) I could practically hear them explaining that Cocinero was an amalgam of all the babies I wanted.
    Screw Candace and the one psychology class she’d taken—she was always making assumptions like that. When I bought Eats & Treats with Lexie, Candace said I was trying to put down roots because I’d never had roots with my parents. When I started spending Christmas mornings with she and Brian and the kids, she’d decided that I was doing it to make up for the lack of holiday memories from my childhood.
    Well… maybe she had a point. A little one.
                  “Slow down,” I said to the white puffball in my lap, my voice high and squeaky. “You’ll get the hiccups.”
                  Cocinero looked up at me with his shiny black eyes and blinked.
                  “Yeah, yeah,” I replied. “I love you, too.”
                  There was a time, way before I moved to the inland northwest to escape the madness that was living in the same city as Annalise, when I’d owned a cat name Freedom. She’d been my treasured pet until I went to college, which is when my mother’s pool boy accidentally knocked her into the pool, where she drowned. But that was beside the point.
                  Freedom was a gift from my father, given to me on the day he left us. I was seven years old, and I still remembered every detail of the experience. My therapist once told me that I remembered everything about that day because it was a traumatic experience, but I like to say it was because I was gifted with a photographic memory. Frankly, it’s the therapist who’s right, though I’ve never admitted that to anyone.
     
                  “Marisol, come inside. Now,” my nanny, Hanna, scolded me from the front porch. She, too, was mad at my dad. Not just because he’d loaded up his Jaguar convertible with suitcases without offering me so much as an explanation, but because in leaving my mother, he was also leaving her , and she’d had big plans on being the new Mrs. Vargas.
    Too bad for Hanna. My father had bigger plans. And those plans didn’t include his self-obsessed wife, the nanny he’d been boinking for a year, or his daughter.
    “No!” I bellowed—I was a screamer, a trait nobody who knew me enjoyed—running down the stairs to the circle drive in front of our palatial house. My father was just starting the engine on his dark green car. “Daddy, wait!”
    He either didn’t hear over the sound of purring motor, or he was ignoring me He slid his aviator sunglasses onto his tanned face with the casual ease of a man leaving to play golf with his buddies. Except that he was abandoning his family for a life of less responsibility and more excitement in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
                  The car started to roll forward, and I pawed at the shiny green metal with my hands. “No! Daddy, no!” I cried, stumbling in my bare feet. The cement was hot in the southern California sun, and it burned my soles. “Wait!”
                  He hit the brakes, and the jaguar screeched to a halt. “Marisol? What the hell are you doing?”
                  “We haven’t played with the kitty yet.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, and limped to the driver’s side. “You said we’d play with her. You promised.”
                  My father took his sunglasses off and rubbed his eyes tiredly. “No. I said you could play with her. You,