The shower runs in the guest bathroom and we have no guests.

This is the first impossibility. The second is the trail of cookie crumbs leading directly to the bathtub — a line of evidence so obvious it insults the intelligence, yet here I am, following it like some amateur sleuth in a drawing room mystery.

The water hits the porcelain with that particular hollow sound of a tub filling rather than a person washing. No steam escapes under the door. No humming, no movement, no life. Just water, running.

I should know better. The trail is too perfect, too deliberate. Cookie crumbs do not arrange themselves in straight lines toward bathroom fixtures. They scatter. They fall where gravity takes them, not where conspiracy requires them to go.

Yet my paws carry me forward.

Gus watches from the sofa with that expression he reserves for my more predictable moments — not judgment, exactly, but a kind of bemused recognition. He has seen this performance before. He knows how it ends. He does not move to follow because he understands what I am still learning: that some traps are worth walking into, and others are simply embarrassing.

The crumbs lead past the studio, where Dad sits at his desk pretending to work. His shoulders are too still. His typing has stopped. The morning tax was collected hours ago — there is no legitimate cookie business happening at this hour.

Past the kitchen, where Mom stands at the counter arranging flowers in a vase, her back to me, her movements careful and unhurried. She does not turn when I pass. This is also suspicious. I am impossible to ignore when cookies are involved.

The guest bathroom door stands ajar. The water continues its steady percussion against porcelain. The trail disappears beneath the door.

I nose it open.

The bathtub is empty. The water runs into nothing, a sound without purpose. On the edge of the tub sits a single cookie — whole, perfect, positioned with the precision of bait.

This is when I understand.

The trail was never about leading me somewhere. It was about leading me away from something else. I turn, padding back through the house, past the kitchen where Mom no longer arranges flowers, past the studio where Dad no longer pretends to type.

The real cookies wait on the counter, arranged in a neat row, still warm from whatever celebration I was not meant to witness early. Tax season filing deadlines approach. Dad has finished something important. The bathtub cookie was a decoy. The shower was theater.

I sit in the kitchen and wait. The performance will end eventually. The real cookies will be distributed with appropriate ceremony. Justice will be served.

But next time, I tell myself, I will not fall for such an obvious deception.

Next time, I will go directly to the real cookies and skip the elaborate misdirection entirely.

Next time.

~P.W.