He opened the refrigerator and stared at the contents. The raw turkeys looked back at him accusingly. He’d never cooked a turkey in his life. He’d never cooked anything more complicated than scrambled eggs.
His phone rang. His mother.
“Good morning, darling. How are the preparations coming along? Is Isabella managing the timeline properly?”
“Mom, we have a problem.”
“What kind of problem? Did she burn something already? I told you we should have hired a caterer for a dinner this size.”
“Isabella’s gone.”
Silence.
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. She left a note saying something came up and she had to leave town. She’s not answering her phone.”
“That’s impossible. Isabella would never abandon a dinner party, especially not today. There must be some misunderstanding.”
Hudson looked at the note again as if it might have changed.
“There’s no misunderstanding. She’s gone, and we have thirty-two people coming for dinner.”
The silence stretched so long that Hudson wondered if the call had dropped.
“Mother, this is a disaster.”
Her voice turned cold and sharp.
“An absolute disaster. What kind of wife abandons her family on Thanksgiving?”
Something about the way she said it—the immediate assumption that Isabella was the villain in this scenario—made Hudson defensive in a way that surprised him.
“Maybe she had an emergency. Maybe something happened that she couldn’t—”
“What emergency requires someone to abandon thirty-two dinner guests without any notice? What emergency prevents someone from answering their phone to explain the situation?”
Hudson didn’t have an answer to that.
“We need to fix this immediately,” Vivien continued, her voice taking on the command tone she used when managing family crises. “Call every decent restaurant in town. See if any of them can prepare an emergency Thanksgiving dinner for thirty-two people.”
Hudson spent the next hour on the phone with restaurants, catering companies, and hotels. Every conversation went the same way: laughter, followed by the information that their Thanksgiving dinners had been booked for months.
“Sir,” said the manager of the Hilton, “it’s 9:00 a.m. on Thanksgiving. Even if we had availability, which we don’t, there’s no way to prepare a dinner for thirty-two people with five hours’ notice.”
By 10:00 a.m., Hudson had exhausted every professional option. His Singapore conference call had come and gone, ignored. He’d probably damaged his relationship with his biggest client, but that seemed secondary to the immediate crisis.
Na
USA