We arrived late on purpose. Not because of traffic and not because we were careless, but because arriving late to my family’s gatherings meant missing the first wave of judgment—the forced embraces, the rehearsed smiles, the moment when everyone collectively agreed to pretend that nothing terrible had happened the last time we were all in the same room. It was a small survival skill I had developed over the course of thirty-nine years as a member of the Ashford family, and I deployed it the way other people deploy sunscreen: automatically, without thinking, because the alternative was damage.
Mara didn’t know any of this. She sat in the passenger seat beside me, smoothing the front of her sweater like it was an item on a checklist, checking her reflection in the visor mirror, adjusting a strand of dark hair that had escaped her ponytail. She was thirteen years old and still believed that preparation could protect you from the people who were supposed to love you.