The frail, aged human sat stone faced as she placidly described the epilogue of her harrowing, decades-old excursion.

“Fifteen-hundred people went into the sea when Titanic sank from under us,” she recalled, as her small, intimate audience clung to her every word. “There were twenty boats floating nearby, and only one came back.

“One.”

A lone tear trickled-down the venerable biped’s cheek as the others fought hard to bridle their own waterworks.

“Six were saved from the water, myself included.”

She paused, letting the magnitude of that absurdly small number effectively settle.

“Six. Out of fifteen-hundred.”

No one spoke as she concluded her narrative. How could they? What could they possibly say? 

But while poignant, her nearly three-hour anecdote omitted one important detail. Along with the six humans pulled from the icy North Atlantic, two felines were rescued as well. The ship’s mousers were frozen and starving, but they survived.

Perhaps the old human simply forgot this detail. Maybe she didn’t deem it noteworthy in a creative retelling of history’s most famous shipwreck. But most likely, she was embarrassed.

And ashamed.

You see, there could’ve been seven people pulled from the ocean that fateful night, had she followed Maddy and Leia’s lead. Though terrified, these two resourceful felines recognized immediately that both of them could fit comfortably on their makeshift raft. Neither of them had to die unnecessarily.

“A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets,” the human would later admit.

Indeed. Dark, selfish and unforgivable secrets.