She'd been performing fine ever since.
She freshened her lip color. Sat back. Studied the mirror.
Better. Tired, yes - she looked tired, and tired was acceptable, tired was a thing you mentioned once with a wave of your hand and people moved on. She was not going to walk into the Blackwood house looking like this. She was not going to sit at their table, surrounded by the warm noise of a family that actually worked, and make Thanksgiving about her grief.
She pulled back onto the road.
She was going to eat Margaret's turkey and laugh at Thomas's terrible jokes and let her closest friend Megan drag her into at least two arguments about nothing important, and she was going to be fine. That was what the Blackwood house did. That was what it had always done for her.
She was almost looking forward to it.
She could hear the noise before she cut the engine - voices, laughter, the early stages of what sounded like a specific argument - and she sat for one moment more, hand on the door handle.
You're okay, she told herself. This is your family. They don't need to know about the rest.
She pushed the door open.
Something hit the window directly beside her head, and she shrieked.
It was a golden retriever. Enormous, enthusiastic, utterly unrepentant, both front paws planted on the car door, tongue working at the glass with industrial commitment, tail going so fast it was nearly invisible.
"Biscuit." The voice came from two feet away - level, faintly amused. "Off."
The dog dropped to the ground. Her tail did not slow. Natalie pressed one hand to her sternum, heart still halfway up her throat, and looked up.
Sebastian Blackwood stood in the driveway with a leash in his hand, wearing a dark green jacket over a grey henley, watching her with an expression that was mostly patience and a small amount of poorly suppressed amusement.
She blinked.
When had he gotten so tall?
She kept a version of Sebastian in her head - the one from when Megan had first introduced him, the summer he was seventeen, still slightly awkward in his limbs the way boys were just before they figured out how to carry themselves. That version was maybe five-nine, still figuring out what to do with his hands. The person standing in front of her was close to six feet, broad through the shoulders, with the same dark eyes as his sister but steadier somehow, more settled, like he'd decided somewhere along the way who he was going to be and had simply gone ahead and become that person.
She stepped out of the car. Biscuit immediately planted both paws on her knees.
"Hi." She grabbed her face in both hands and let her wash whatever was left of her composure with sloppy, devoted enthusiasm. Something in her chest loosened. It was genuinely impossible to feel hollow when an animal was this happy to see you - it wasn't performative, it wasn't scheduled, it was just immediate and unconditional. "Hi, you lunatic. Okay. Yes. I missed you too."