Page 71 - The Midnight Library

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wanted you to say his name, so that you would feel something.’

Nora was hot with agitation now. ‘ at’s even worse! You sent me into
that life knowing Volts would be dead. And Volts was dead. So, nothing
changed.’
Mrs Elm’s eyes twinkled again. ‘Except you.’

‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you don’t see yourself as a bad cat owner any more. You looked aer
him as well as he could have been looked aer. He loved you as much as you
loved him, and maybe he didn’t want you to see him die. You see, cats know.

ey understand when their time is up. He went outside because he was
going to die, and he knew it.’
Nora tried to take this in. Now she thought about it, there hadn’t been any
external signs of damage on her cat’s body. She had just jumped to the same

conclusion that Ash had jumped to. at a dead cat on the road was
probably dead because of the road. And if a surgeon could think that, a mere
layperson would think that too. Two plus two equals car accident.
‘Poor Volts,’ Nora muttered, mournfully.

Mrs Elm smiled, like a teacher who saw a lesson being understood.
‘He loved you, Nora. You looked aer him as well as anyone could. Go
and look at the last page of e Book of Regrets.’
Nora could see that the book was lying on the floor. She knelt on the floor

beside it.
‘I don’t want to open it again.’
‘Don’t worr y. It will be safer this time. Just stick to the last page.’
Once she had flicked to the last page, she saw one of her ver y last regrets –

‘I was bad at looking aer Voltaire’ – slowly disappear from the page. e
letters fading like retreating strangers in a fog.
Nora closed the book before she could feel anything bad happen.
‘So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Somet imes

regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A
load of bullshit.’
Nora tried to think back to her schooldays, to remember if Mrs Elm had
said the word ‘bullshit’ before, and she was pretty sure she hadn’t.

‘But I still don’t get why you let me go into that life if you knew Volts was
going to be dead anyway? You could have told me. You could have just told
me I wasn’t a bad cat owner. Why didn’t you?’