Claudia died on January 31, 2005. Two weeks later, her cat Buttercup died too. The vet said it was kidney failure. He also said cats can die of grief.

This is their story, told by Buttercup.

For ten years, a small orange cat watched everything that happened in a Los Angeles apartment - the emergencies and the ordinary evenings, the long bad months and the good days when Claudia cooked something complicated and talked to her while she did it. Buttercup tracked the things nobody else noticed: the way a room's smell changes when someone is frightened, the specific sound of breathing that costs too much, the difference between the man who stays calm and the man who is afraid and staying calm anyway.

Buttercup is an unreliable narrator. She misreads things, admits what she doesn't understand, and sees the world entirely through smell and sound and the weight of the people she loves. She is also, it turns out, the most honest witness this story has.

This is a memoir about Claudia - funny, sharp, sick for most of the years Richard knew her, and more fully herself than almost anyone he'd met. It's about what it costs to love someone whose body is working against them, and what it looks like from the floor, from the back of the couch, from the doorway at three in the morning when the air changes and a cat starts to run.

It's about grief that goes all the way down. The human kind and the animal kind, which turn out to be the same thing.