Even as he unfolded it, some part of his brain refused to accept what he was reading.
“Hudson, something came up and I had to leave town. You’ll need to handle Thanksgiving dinner. The groceries are in the fridge. Isabella.”
He read it three times before the words began to make sense.
She was gone. Isabella, his wife, who had never missed a family obligation, who had never failed to deliver a perfect meal, who had never left him to handle anything domestic, was gone.
His first thought was that someone must have died—a family emergency that had required her immediate departure. He grabbed his phone and called her. It went straight to voicemail.
“Bella, I found your note. What happened? Whose emergency? Call me back immediately. People are going to start arriving in six hours and I need to know when you’ll be back.”
He hung up and called again. Voicemail again.
That’s when panic began to set in. Not panic about the dinner—that seemed too enormous to process yet. Panic about his wife, who always answered her phone, who never went anywhere without telling him exactly where she’d be and when she’d return.
He called her sister, Carmen.
“Hudson, it’s early. Is everything okay?”
“Is Isabella with you? Did someone in your family— Is there an emergency?”
“What? No, everyone’s fine. Why would Isabella be here? Isn’t she cooking your Thanksgiving feast?”
The way Carmen said “your Thanksgiving feast” carried an edge he’d never noticed before, like she knew something about their holiday arrangements that she didn’t approve of.M
“She left a note saying she had to leave town. I thought maybe she went to you. I mean, thirty people are coming for dinner in six hours and she’s vanished.”
“Thirty people?” Carmen’s voice sharpened instantly. “Hudson, are you insane? You expected your wife to cook for thirty people by herself?”
The judgment in her voice stung.
“She’s good at this stuff. She likes hosting.”
“She likes hosting intimate dinners with friends, not feeding an army of your relatives who treat her like hired help.”
Hudson ended the call, disturbed by Carmen’s reaction. Why was everyone acting like this was somehow his fault?
He tried Isabella’s phone again. Voicemail.
By 8:15 a.m., his conference call with Singapore was looming. The call he couldn’t miss. The one that could determine his promotion timeline for the next year. But thirty-two people were expecting dinner in less than six hours.
Na
USA