She'd told herself she wasn't waiting. She'd believed it for about forty minutes.
That was how long she'd managed to sit in her apartment without checking her phone - a personal record for Thanksgiving, which was saying something. She'd muted the parade on television because the cheerfulness was making her feel worse, poured a glass of Riesling she wasn't going to drink, and propped a research paper in her lap that she hadn't turned a page of since noon.
Her father's name sat at the top of her contacts with a small house emoji beside it, which she'd added two years ago in a moment of optimism that now felt more embarrassing than she cared to examine. She'd kept him in her favorites long after the calls became less frequent, long after she'd learned to stop expecting him to pick up on the first ring. The habit of a daughter who called her dad for everything - she just hadn't been able to delete it.
She'd been watching that house emoji since nine in the morning.
He'd mentioned, the week before, that the firm was taking the full holiday week. Partners' decision, he'd said at their monthly dinner, the scheduled one they'd established after the divorce as a gesture toward maintained connection, the one that had never quite evolved into anything warmer than calendar maintenance. I'll have some time. He hadn't followed that with anything. She'd waited. He'd ordered the salmon.
She'd carried that detail - I'll have some time - through all of October and into November, the way she carried things that might turn into something good. He had time. Time was convertible. Time was the one thing you needed to do almost anything, including call your daughter on Thanksgiving.
He had not called.
Her mother was less of a surprise. Her mother was consistent in her patterns, and her patterns had been established clearly in the years after the divorce: birthday calls, Christmas texts, occasional voicemails in response to health updates that Natalie had learned to package as non-emergencies so her mother wouldn't panic before she finished a glass of wine. Thanksgiving hadn't been on the schedule in four years. Natalie had no idea why she'd thought this year would be different.
That was the part that ached - not the disappointment itself, which she'd built up enough scar tissue around to manage, but the fact that she kept hoping anyway. Every holiday she walked back in expecting something. She should know better by now. She did know better. She just couldn't stop.
She waited until four o'clock. Then she picked up her keys.
The crying started on 101, somewhere in the stretch between the city and the headlands where the road curved out over the water. It wasn't the dignified kind. It was the ugly kind - chest heaving, nose running, the whole embarrassing production she generally reserved for when she was absolutely certain no other human being was within earshot. She cried through the Waldo Tunnel and she cried through the bridge stretch and she cried until she couldn't see the road, and then she pulled onto the shoulder with her hazards blinking and sat there and let it finish.