Woman reunites with missing cat who was hiding under returned furniture: 'It was so upsetting'

Losing a pet can be a heart-wrenching experience and the pain of not knowing where they are or if they are safe can be overwhelming. A similar thing happened to Randi McGlone Reyna who lost her cat in the most unexpected way.  Reyna decided to buy a new recliner chair to relax in with her cat, named Inky, while watching some television.

After careful consideration, she selected a soft grey model from the Big Sandy Superstore located near her home in South Ashland, Kentucky. Upon delivery, her feline companion quickly claimed the chair for herself and climbed inside without Reyna's knowledge. Unfortunately, Reyna decided to return the recliner due to its button-operated reclining mechanism, which she found unappealing, per The Washington Post.

“I hated it — the chair turned over on top of me,” said Reyna, 59. “So I called the store and told them I wanted to buy a chair with a manual lever.” Soon, two delivery workers came to take the recliner back on March 1st. At this moment, Inky was nowhere in sight, and Reyna feared that the cat might have escaped through the open front door while the chair was being carried out. Reyna expressed her concern, saying "When they hauled the chair out the door, I thought maybe Inky had gotten out because I didn’t see her anywhere. She’s always afraid when there are strangers in the house."

She couldn’t find Inky in the house or the yard, or anywhere else around her neighborhood. “It was so upsetting — she’d just disappeared, and I began to think that she’d run off and I’d never see her again,” Reyna said, also revealing her dog, Gracie, also seemed concerned because she and Inky had become best friends. Reyna had rescued Inky as a kitten about a decade ago from a gasoline fire.

“I found her between two houses after a man started a brush fire to clear away some debris, not realizing there were cats there,” she said. Reyna said two other kittens had run away from the blaze as well. At the time, she had immediately taken the kitten to a veterinarian who cared for her for two months, which helped her burns to heal, she said. However, Inky did suffer from some permanent eye damage.

“She had some painful burns, but she fought through it,” she said. When Inky went missing, Reyna said she could not even sleep because she could not stop thinking of her cat being scared and alone in the dark. Fate had other plans for their reunion. On the third day, her phone rang and an employee from the Big Sandy Superstore warehouse in Wheelersburg, Ohio, contacted her.

“Do you have a black cat?” the store employees asked her. They informed her that a cat had jumped out of the chair when it was returned and ran away quickly. "They told me that my cat had come out of the returned chair as soon as they set it down inside," she said. Reyna was dismayed to learn that the chair had been on the truck for three days without any food or water, leaving her cat stranded in the dark. "My poor cat! Three days without food or water! I couldn't believe it," she added.

Reyna was finally reunited with her beloved cat Inky, putting all her worries to rest. It was unbelievable to think that Inky would refuse to leave her favorite sofa.