"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-"