This is a story of being catfished—you know, when you think you’re getting to know an attractive person online with a successful career, who may even have their family name on a wing at the hospital, only you’re actually corresponding with a troll in a third world country emptying your bank account.

And although this is also a story reminiscent of the first rule of writing: “Nothing is as it appears,” I want you to know from the outset I’m not as naïve as I look.

Okay, that’s a lie

But I do know that no matter how many Instagram requests I receive, that’s not the real Liam Neeson who wants to follow me, or the real Keanu Reeves who wants to be my friend.

Because that would be just silly.

Really silly…

(This is where you say, “It’s not them! Move on!”)

So, the ad said, “Small, sweet, gray kitten, free to good home.” I suppose it was our first foray into being pet owners –the precursor to being parents. We made an appointment with the family running the ad and drove out to Cape St. Claire to meet our new offspring. “I love you already,” I thought as we drove to their neighborhood. “Even more so if you are the runt of the litter.” I was born to champion the disadvantaged.

We sat on the plaid sofa in the living room of a middle-class split-level while the patriarch of a somewhat strange clan retrieved the animal advertised. But what came sauntering down the hall in this house full of liars was no sweet gray kitten. It was an enormous striped alley cat with a gun-slinger swagger. This cat was packing heat. Wearing shades and an attitude. Mr. Oliver and I looked at each other and then back at the ringer like we were in the twilight zone. How could what we were expecting be so different from what we found? Where was the disconnect between the ad for the sweet gray kitten and well, Cujo?

But we had come to get a cat—and we were going to leave with a cat. I did not know yet that I’m not good at shifting gears—at letting go of what I am anticipating to embrace a new reality.

So we took this thug home, optimistically naming her “Sweetcakes,” and Cakers was immediately in charge. We were afraid. Very afraid.

She insisted on sleeping at the foot of our bed, the problem being that if either of us moved one bare foot, even an inch, she dove onto the covers, grabbed whatever moved with her claws, fell on her side, legs thrumming, and sunk needle-sharp teeth through the comforter into bare skin till you screamed.

We lay as still as death, trying not to even twitch, but it was inevitable—one of us would move a leg followed by a shriek in the dark and a competitive scramble for safe space under the covers. As reality dawned that she wasn’t going to acclimate – we were slow learners –we decided to banish her by closing the door to the bedroom. But that just made her sit on striped haunches out in the hall and howl.

We lived in Navy Housing, where thin walls between units meant she was keeping others awake, but the hollow interior doors left about an inch of open space at the bottom, so newly inspired, she hunkered down on her side in the hall and stuck huge, hairy arms like salad tongs under the door clawing at the air trying to latch onto us. We’d sit up in bed transfixed, staring at the disembodied forearms like we were watching a horror movie—The Thing was in the hall! The Thing might get under the door at any moment. I have to admit it was a little exciting.

During the day, she caught mice to play with. She’d take them out into the yard and throw them so high in the air even she didn’t see where they landed. And when we got a second cat, a sweet, small, low-IQ stray we named Henry (let’s have another baby, the dopey couple said, the first one didn’t work out so well), she repeatedly sauntered over to the sofa where he lay sleeping, leaped up and sat on him as if he didn’t exist, usually settling down complacently on his dumb little head.

And then we got pregnant. Like—how bad could having a baby be, we said? At least we won’t be afraid of it.

.I’d like to say I’m quicker now to relinquish what I am hoping for when what I find is something different. But I’m not.

I expected to dance, to become an astronomer, a physicist, a healer, to write a bestseller by the age of 30.

I expected to be a better daughter than I was, to live in one house my whole adult life with a white picket fence and a rose trellis—where the family gathered for parental wisdom and homemade baked bread.

I intended to be a perfect mother.

Can you imagine that naivete, Liam Neeson?

Are you shaking your head, Keanu Reeves?

It’s just that it feels as if the possibility of doing better is still an option when so many expectations have been realized. I did have a house with a white picket fence and rose trellis for a time. I never became an astronomer, but I study the stars. I didn’t write a bestseller, but I did publish a book that I wrote from the heart. I didn’t become a physicist, but I am a student of the cosmos, the search for the beginning, and aren’t we all healers?

If time is an illusion unlived potential is, too –reality is still in play–the ending of your story hasn’t been written yet.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I was in the wine store the other day not asking for help because I already know that all the least expensive wines are displayed on the lowest shelves so that you have to crouch down near the floor to read those descriptions and prices, which means you are in the way of customers who don’t have to get on the floor to buy wine. You just hunch a shoulder toward the shelf so they can brush past you in the narrow aisle like a tumbleweed on the prairie or boulder in a stream. Balancing on the floor with my purse on one shoulder and a South Moon Under bag in the other hand, I tried not to keel over while reminding myself that the average price Americans pay for a bottle of wine is $12.75.

I was reading wine labels when I found what I was looking for– a “crisp, dry, Sauvignon Blanc with citrusy notes” for $12.99, and walked up to the counter to pay for it. I gave my name to be sure the manager logged the purchase in on my account so that at some point in the future I would qualify for something undefined but good. A whole curated box of holiday wines, perhaps. Or publication of my next book—it doesn’t matter—just the vague promise of accumulating points for a bonus is enough to register every purchase.

The manager looked like my high school friend Jerry Ward, who decided to be a small-town doctor in Vermont at the age of 17 and then, lo and behold, became one. Very cute, with dark curly hair, expressive dark eyes. I thought we were chatting quite amiably when not-Jerry suddenly raised his voice and became very stern.

“Ohhhh no! Not you again!”

I thought he was still talking to me at first. Like he’d suddenly recognized me as that slacker English major who would never earn a discernable income. Startled, I looked up from where I’d been searching for my credit card.

“Oh no, you don’t!” he repeated. “You’re not going to pull this again!”

I realized then that although he was continuing to ring up my wine on autopilot, he was actually looking over my head at someone behind me.

I turned and saw a very scruffy older character who had obviously stuck a bottle of wine down his pants. The top of the bottle protruded from under his shirt above his belt like the creature Sigourney Weaver had to vanquish in Alien.

The man muttered a denial and made no move to extract the bottle from his pants. Only four of us were in the store at the time: me, the manager, a salesclerk, and the thief. We all looked at each other. Pulling the evidence from this man’s pants was a task none of us was willing to perform.

Since he denied the bottle was in there, and we were unwilling to prove it, we were in a kind of a standoff. Encouraged, our shoplifter started edging towards the door in mincing, scuffing baby steps.

Irate, the manager abandoned me and came around the counter. “Stop right there! Sir! You’re not going to get away with this again! You pulled this stunt last week! I’ve got you on camera!” The shoplifter continued to mutter his denial and shuffle toward the door.

I’m having a robbery, I thought, a bit excited at this development in my day.

Like one entity, equally helpless but braver as a unit, the manager, salesclerk, and I all began instinctively moving in a sort of communal shuffle of our own between the thief and the door.

The salesclerk announced loudly, “I’m calling security,” and I stood there while she reported to the authorities that a robbery was in progress. I was still standing there when they didn’t come.

“Good thing no one has a weapon,” I observed quietly to her, then wondered if that was true. What are the conceal/carry laws in Maryland, I wondered? Maybe the guy’s not lying. He’s not stealing wine; he’s stuffed a gun in his pants!

“Let me get you out of here, “the salesclerk whispered to me and quickly completed my purchase as the stalemate continued.

As I walked past the manager in this bizarre standoff, I offered, “Alzheimer’s? Dementia?” The situation was so bizarre that the possibility seemed warranted.

“No way,” the manager said, then added softly, “I’m sorry for this.” His apology felt intimate. Like an intruder had interrupted our family dinner. Or as if the conflict had made us teammates for a moment. Team Right-Side of the Law! Team Right versus Wrong.

Fortunate versus Unfortunate. Us versus Them. I edged on out the door.

I was back in the store a few weeks later—okay, a week later—and reminded the manager that I’d been there during the incident. “What happened?” I asked. “I noticed Security never came.”

“Oh, they came,” he said. “After you left. It was a big deal. He resisted arrest. They got him on a bunch of counts. That guy has been pulling this stunt all over this shopping center. He’s been banned from the entire place for two years.”

“What did you do with the wine down his pants?” I asked, eyeing the bottle I was buying. The manager rolled his eyes, and we laughed about how that bottle was a goner, about all the inadequate ways one might have rehabilitated it. Ha, ha, ha, we laughed together as he slipped my purchase into a bag. I handed not-Jerry a credit card, looked at the bottle I was buying, and wondered, not about wine but about the man who needed to steal it.

About how little space there is–none actually– between us and them.

About what we conceal and what we carry.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.