"I track things." He kept his gaze forward. "Dates, intervals. It's just how my brain works."
She studied him. The practiced focus on the front door. The faintest tension in his jaw. The way he'd said two months and twenty days - not hesitating, not calculating, as if the number had simply been sitting there ready, as if it were the kind of number a person kept somewhere accessible.
She filed that away.
"Good with numbers," she said mildly. "Got it."
He exhaled - she heard it, the quiet release - and looked at her then, briefly, and she caught something in his expression that was partly relief and partly something else she didn't have time to name.
The moment dissolved into Megan's voice detonating above them.
"NATALIE." Megan appeared at the second-floor window, leaning out at a concerning angle, both hands on the sill. "Tell my mother she is wrong about the hem right now. I need an objective third party."
Margaret Blackwood materialized beside her daughter a half-second later, unruffled, elbow on the sill. "Tell my daughter the gown needs two inches off the hem and she's going to trip during the Reynolds gala."
Natalie looked up at both of them framed in the warm light of the window.
She felt it then - that specific, particular warmth. The feeling of being in a place that wanted her in it, loudly and immediately, without conditions attached.
"Let me see the dress," she called up. "I can't rule without evidence."
"Reasonable!" Megan vanished.
"Entirely sensible," Margaret said, with the satisfied expression of someone who already knew she was right, and disappeared as well.
Sebastian held the front door open. Natalie stepped through into the noise and warmth and the specific, familiar smell of a house that had been the same house for twenty-five years, and let herself be pulled immediately toward the staircase by Margaret's beckoning hand, already laughing at something the two of them were saying simultaneously.
She was, she thought, going to be okay tonight.
Sebastian stood inside the front door after she disappeared up the staircase.
He could hear her voice above him - laughing at something his mother said, the clear unguarded sound of it carrying down over the noise of the whole house, unaware of the person at the bottom of the stairs listening to it.
He looked down at Biscuit.
"I know," he said quietly.
Biscuit's tail beat slow arcs against the floor.
Sebastian crouched down and scratched the dog's ears, keeping his voice low. "Six years, two months, and twenty days. She thinks I'm good with numbers." He paused. "I am good with that specific number. I know exactly when it started - the last week of August, when she and Meg came back from Yosemite and she walked into the kitchen with her hair still half-damp from the lake and told my mother she'd gotten the Hopkins scholarship offer, and my mother cried, and she looked so-"
He stopped.
He'd never found the right word for how she'd looked. He'd tried six years' worth of words and none of them fit. Like she'd finally been given permission to take up space. Like she'd decided she was allowed to want good things. Like she was already halfway out the door and still somehow the most present person in the room.
He'd been seventeen. He hadn't known what to do with it.
He stood up.
From upstairs came the sound of Megan mounting a full defense of her hemline, Natalie saying something that made both his mother and his sister laugh at the same time - a feat he'd personally witnessed exactly four times in his life. She was good at that. Finding the path through things. Making a room warmer without performing warmth.
He went to the kitchen to put the leash away and remind himself that tonight, being at the same table was enough.
He almost meant it.
Three weeks later, Megan called him at eleven forty-seven. No greeting.
"New England clam chowder," she said. "Rodriguez's. From the pot, fresh. And the cinnamon apple pie."
Sebastian was in bed with an architecture journal. "Call a delivery service."
"Rodriguez doesn't do third-party delivery. You know this. The cream separates in the travel containers and it becomes a completely different texture-"
"Megan."
"-and the pie has to be warm, you cannot refrigerate and reheat the Rodriguez pie, the crust goes soft and you lose the whole cinnamon-to-apple distribution-"
"It's midnight."
"I'm aware."
"You're in Berkeley. That's forty minutes from the estate."
"Forty-two on holiday traffic, I clocked it. Look, my brain is actively deteriorating from dining hall food. I can feel my frontal lobe shutting down. This is a medical situation, Sebastian."
"It isn't."
"My thesis-"
"Will be fine."
"Sebastian."
"No."
Silence. He turned a page.
"Natalie's coming to the library at noon tomorrow," Megan said. "We were going to get lunch after."
He closed the journal.
Three seconds of quiet.
"I'll leave at eleven," he said.
"Oh, thank God-"
"This isn't about the soup."
"I know it isn't about the soup."
"I'm going back to sleep."
"Yes, fine, I love you, you're my favorite-"
He hung up. Lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, aware with complete clarity of exactly what he was doing. He had a name for it - the way every decision in his life had been quietly, consistently organized around the question of proximity to one specific person. He was not going to analyze it tonight.
He picked up his phone and checked the Berkeley forecast. Clear skies, fifty-eight degrees. Cold enough for coats.
He put his phone down.
He was in Berkeley by eleven-fifteen.
The street outside the library's east entrance had the particular energy of December finals week - students moving in clusters with coffee cups and the ambient urgency of people calculating how many hours they had left. Sebastian stood near the wall with the Rodriguez bag at his feet and his phone going increasingly unread, because Megan had been sending location updates from the library stacks that he had chosen not to respond to.