Missing cat reunited with owners after 5 years: ‘I was in disbelief’

It was one purr-fect reunion.

A Maryland family miraculously reunited with their long-lost cat who was missing for five years.

Artemis, who is an indoor-outdoor feline, left his Hickory home in September 2021 and never returned.

Its owners — mother and daughter Melissa and Brooke Garci — desperately tried to find their lost fur baby.

“I posted them around the neighborhood, rolled them up, and put them in people’s doors, knocked, and got nothing,” mom Melissa told CBS News.

When the cat, who was found in an unfinished basement years later, was brought into the Harford County Humane Society in Fallston, just over seven miles away, its microchip was scanned.

The shelter called the phone number connected to the chip and it led them to the Garcis.

“This woman answered, ‘Hello?’ And we said we have your cat, and she was unbelieving. And she said, ‘Are you sure? My cat has been missing for five years,’” Erin Long of the society told the outlet.

The shelter recalled the moment the creature, whose name was inspired by the Greek goddess for hunting and wilderness, saw his owners after five years.

“He kind of walked out of the kennel and looked at them and went right over and was rubbing on them, got in mom’s lap, got in daughter’s lap. It was a beautiful thing,” Long said.

“I was like, I couldn’t cry yet because I was in disbelief, but when I saw her, I was like, ‘Omg, she looks exactly the same,’” Brooke added.