Evena, who was once what you might call well-padded, went on a strict diet and now looks great— but the slenderizing certainly wasn’t intentional.

Evena is a three-year-old calico cat who went missing from her Willarch Road home in mid-May. As an indoor-outdoor cat, she was free to come and go through a window in the basement, but she usually returned each night — until she didn’t, which “wasn’t like her,” owner Melissa Hallowell said.

Hallowell tried to figure out where Evena had gotten to. Maybe she had stowed away in one of road construction vehicles that was being used for repairs on nearby Route 126, or was frightened by their noise and wandered farther off than usual. She made “lost cat” posters and put them up in the neighborhood. A couple of neighbors told her early on that they had seen the cat, but as more time went by, Hallowell began to fear the worst.

“I was 85% sure that a predator had gotten her,” she said.

The family was starting to accept the fact they might never see Evena again. But all that changed one night in late June when a neighbor called to say he’d heard meowing while on a walk earlier in the day and then spotted the cat — sitting behind a window screen of an apparently vacant house on Route 126. He snapped a photo (see below) and sent it to Hallowell, who immediately started trying to track down keys to the house. But that turned out to be unnecessary. When her husband came home that night, he simply walked over to the house, removed the screen, “and she jumped into his arms, she said.

The Hallowells aren’t sure how Evena got into the house or why she couldn’t get out by herself, but they did learn later that it had a leaky bathtub faucet, which apparently gave the cat enough to drink over the five weeks she was missing. No food was to be had, however, but she had enough fat to see her through. Not surprisingly, when she was reunited with her family, “she was half her size,” Hallowell said. “She looked like an adolescent cat again — it was like turning back the clock.”

Aside from the enforced weight loss, Evena (now an indoor-only cat) was none the worse for wear, though her voice was hoarse for about two weeks. Being corralled for a checkup at the vet has also made her somewhat wary — she often now hides in the basement.

“This is the value of listening when you walk,” Hallowell said, noting that they may not have rescued the cat in time if their neighbor hadn’t heard meowing and wondered where it was coming from. Hallowell herself had walked by the same house several times, and though she never heard Evena, “I always got a weird feeling of her presence.”