Two Years Gone, One Phone Call Home: Anne Twist and Her Cat Evie

When a cat slips out the door and doesn't come back, the first days are agony and the following weeks are a slow, grinding erosion of hope. That is what Anne Twist lived through when her cat Evie — a small floof marked with white and patches of black — went out one day and simply never returned. Twist, a children's author who is also the mother of Harry Styles and Gemma Styles, searched for months. She did everything a devoted pet owner does: hoping, looking, waiting for a sign. But the months stretched on with no sign of Evie, and eventually, painfully, Twist resigned herself to the belief that her little cat was gone for good.

Two years passed. In the world of missing pets, two years is a lifetime — long enough that most people stop looking, stop expecting, stop imagining any ending but a sad one. Evie's whereabouts during that entire stretch remain a mystery to this day. Where she went, how she survived, who she may have lived alongside — none of it is known. She had simply vanished into a two-year gap that no one has been able to fill in.

Then, in February 2025, came the phone call. As Twist would later recount, it arrived the night before the reunion. A small rescue centre in the UK — Willows Way Cat Rescue — had Evie. The pieces of the story, as they emerged, were as gentle as they were astonishing. A kind woman had noticed a cat around her property and, moved by simple compassion, had taken her in and fed her for a couple of days in her greenhouse. Not knowing where the cat had come from, the woman had gotten the rescue centre involved. And that is where the single most important decision Twist had made years earlier paid off: when the rescue scanned the cat, they found a microchip — and the chip led them straight back to Anne Twist.

The reunion moved her deeply, and she shared it publicly on Instagram, both to celebrate and to gently urge other pet owners to do what had saved her. In her own words, she wrote: "The most incredible thing happened today .. I got my little Evie back! Two years ago she went out and never came back. After months spent searching I was resigned to having lost her." She went on to describe the phone call and the greenhouse, and the disbelief of holding her cat again: "Last night I got a phone call .. a little rescue centre @willowswaycatrescue had her! She'd been taken in by a lovely lady who had fed her for a couple of days in her greenhouse. Although I have no idea where she has been for the past two years I am immensely grateful to have her home."

Twist used the moment to make a heartfelt plea about microchipping, the very thing that had brought Evie back. "From June last year it became the law to have your cats microchipped .. something I have always done since I started having them in my life … keep your details updated, miracles can happen." The law she referred to is the United Kingdom's requirement, which came into force in June 2024, mandating that pet cats in England be microchipped. According to the UK government, with more than nine million pet cats in England, mandatory microchipping makes it far easier for lost or stray cats to be reunited with their owners — mirroring the long-standing rule for dogs, which has proven that microchipped animals are significantly more likely to find their way home.

Evie's homecoming carried an extra tenderness for the Twist and Styles household, a family that has always been openly devoted to its cats. Evie was one of several beloved felines in Anne's care, and her return in early 2025 came not long after the family had mourned the loss of Dusty, the long-lived cat Harry Styles had spoken about affectionately for years. Against that backdrop, the recovery of a cat everyone had given up for lost felt all the more like a gift.

There is a particular kind of grace in Evie's story — the way a stranger's small kindness, a rescue centre's diligence, and a tiny chip beneath a cat's skin combined to undo two years of loss in a single evening. Anne Twist had kept her contact details current for years, never quite knowing whether it would ever matter. In the end, it was the reason she got to hold her little Evie again. As she put it herself: keep your details updated, miracles can happen.