"It's definitely fate," Michelle Wright said. "It's nothing short of a miracle."
Wright, who lives in Barrington, New Hampshire, thought she had seen the last of Fuzzy when he ran off from a friend's house back in 2010.
"One of her neighbors had told me that a black and white cat that resembled him had been struck by a car, which was extremely devastating," she said. "I was a mess for quite and while, and I had given up for the most part."
But the cat came back, found wandering the streets of nearby Dover.
Two weeks ago, the Cocheco Valley Shelter brought Fuzzy to the Pet Connections pet store, which is just down the street from Wright's house. And as fate would have it, she stopped in to buy something shortly after Fuzzy was dropped off.
"And I had said to my husband, 'Wow he looks an awful lot like Fuzzy,'" Wright said. "And I asked how old he was, and she said according to the shelter, he was four years old. And at that very moment, I knew."
She told the owners of the store that it was her cat.
"Then she was really adamant about it, like 'That's my cat, I swear. That looks just like my cat, I'm going to have to bring in pictures,'" pet store owner Jesse Senter said. "And then, the next day, she brought in pictures and lo and behold, they matched up. Everything to the paw prints and colors and markings and everything."
A unique mark on Fuzzy's paw helped confirm his identity. Wright still had to go through the official adoption process of adopting her cat, which included paying an $85 fee -- a small price to pay, she says, to get her beloved cat back.
