Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Hudson barely waited until the apartment door closed behind Makayla and Evan before asking why Abby had opened the second bottle. He stood at the dining table collecting the wineglasses by their stems, his attention fixed on the two inches of Bordeaux remaining in Abby’s.
The apartment still smelled of coconut curry and coffee, and rain patterned the windows behind him, turning the city lights into blurred streaks of white and red. Abby remained in the dining room long enough to hear the elevator carry their friends toward the lobby.
“I didn’t open it. I thought you did.” Abby gathered the dessert plates and stacked them carefully, keeping Makayla’s mostly untouched slice on top. “Maybe Makayla did.”
“You didn’t even drink it.” Hudson lifted her glass and examined what remained as though she had wasted something more personal than wine. “You barely touched either one.”
Abby carried the plates into the kitchen and set them beside the sink. Her stomach had felt unsettled since the afternoon, an intermittent sourness she had blamed on too much coffee and too little lunch, but the smell of the wine had deepened it.
“My stomach has been off,” she said as Hudson followed her into the kitchen. She turned on the tap and rinsed chocolate from the first plate, hoping the running water would discourage him from making the matter larger than it was. “I figured it would make it worse.”
“You could have said something before I opened a second two-hundred-dollar bottle.” Hudson placed the glasses on the counter with a clipped care that communicated annoyance more effectively than slamming them would have. “I wouldn’t have wasted it on Makayla and Evan.”
Abby shut off the water and turned toward him. “They drank it.”
“They don’t know the difference.” Hudson picked up the bottle and held it to the light before replacing the stopper. “Evan treats wine like another substance he has to consume to be polite, and Makayla would be happy with something from a box.”
The cruelty was casual, delivered without the heat that might have made it easier to challenge. Hudson opened the refrigerator, made room on the door for the bottle, and seemed to consider the subject settled.
“Makayla knows more about wine than I do,” Abby said, defending her friend as she dried her hands. “She worked restaurants all through college, and Evan knows good wine — he brought that bottle we had at your birthday dinner last year.”
“Makayla knows when something is expensive” Hudson closed the refrigerator and leaned against it, watching Abby with mild impatience. “That isn’t the same as understanding what she’s being given.”
Abby thought of the camel coat, the diamond bracelet, and the way Makayla had become defensive about both.
Hudson had spent years describing her as greedy and shallow, while also judging her for every sign that she had once gone without, and Abby had never understood why Makayla bothered him enough to inspire such precise contempt.
“She had nothing growing up,” Abby said with a sigh, as she returned to the dishes. “Wanting beautiful things now doesn’t make her shallow.”
“You always turn her worst qualities as evidence of her martyrdom,” Hudson stepped close enough to kiss the side of Abby’s head, his irritation apparently exhausted. “Lots of people have sob stories in life. You’re too soft-hearted, it’s one of the reasons people take advantage of you.”
He left her standing at the sink and carried his phone toward the bedroom. Abby heard the shower start a few minutes later, although Hudson usually waited until morning, and she found herself looking at the hallway without knowing why the change registered.
The thought dissolved beneath another wave of nausea. Abby pressed her palm to her stomach and breathed until it passed, then wrapped Makayla’s uneaten dessert and put it in the refrigerator.
Hudson was already in bed when Abby finished cleaning the kitchen. His phone lay facedown on the nightstand beneath his hand, and he moved it into the drawer when she entered.
“Everything okay?” Abby asked as she removed her earrings. She watched him close the drawer and expected some explanation, but Hudson merely picked up the remote.
“My father is being difficult about the merger.” He turned on the television and raised the volume before she could ask what that had to do with hiding his phone. “I don’t want to spend the rest of the night talking about work.”
Abby changed for bed and told herself she had imagined the defensiveness because they were both tired.
Hudson reached for her after she climbed beneath the covers, drawing her against his side with the proprietary ease of habit, and she rested her cheek over his heart until the tension in his body softened.
Makayla canceled breakfast on Sunday morning eleven minutes before Abby reached the café.
Her message said a physician from one of her hospital accounts had agreed to meet before rounds, giving Makayla an unexpected opportunity to discuss the new anticoagulant her company had spent months preparing to launch.
Pharmaceutical sales had taught Makayla to treat access as its own currency, and she never refused time with a doctor who could influence an entire department. Abby believed the explanation until she called to reschedule and heard music behind Makayla’s voice.
“Are you already at the hospital?” Abby asked as she stopped beneath the café awning. Rain tapped against the canvas above her, lighter than it had been Friday but steady enough to darken the pavement.
“I’m in the car.” Makayla answered too quickly, and the music disappeared in the middle of a song. “The Bluetooth connected when you called.”
“I thought I heard people.” Abby shifted her umbrella against her shoulder and tried to place the muted noise that remained. “Is the doctor meeting you somewhere else?”
“The lobby is crowded.” Makayla lowered her voice, then spoke to someone away from the phone before returning. “I have to go, Abby. I’ll call you tonight.”
The call ended before Abby could answer. She stood outside the café looking at Makayla’s name on the screen.
Makayla did not call that night. At ten thirty, she sent an apology and said the meeting had led to drinks with several hospital administrators, then ignored Abby’s question about whether she had made it home.
Hudson came in twenty minutes later carrying the sharp outdoor smell of rain. He apologized for spending the evening with his father, draping his wet coat over the back of a dining chair instead of hanging it.
“How is the merger?” Abby asked while he poured himself water. She sat at the island with her laptop open to a list of ceremony readings, waiting for him to complain about whatever crisis had kept him out on a Sunday.
“Tedious.” Hudson drank half the glass and glanced at her screen. “Please don’t choose anything about two souls becoming one. Marriage is already sentimental enough without making the guests listen to metaphors.”
“I wasn’t planning to.” Abby closed the browser tab after he walked away, no longer interested in the reading she had been considering. “Did you and your father eat?”
Hudson paused at the hallway. “At the club. Why?”
“You smell like garlic.” Abby watched his shoulders tighten beneath his damp shirt, although the observation had not been an accusation. “I was going to save you some pasta if you were hungry.”
“Then put it away.” He continued toward the bedroom without looking back. “I already told you I ate.”
Abby remained at the island after the shower began. His coat dripped onto the hardwood behind her, and when she moved it, the paper in the pocket turned out to be a parking receipt from a garage in Ashford, forty minutes from the club.
For a moment, she considered carrying it into the bedroom and asking about it, then she remembered that one of the merger attorneys lived near Ashford, that Hudson often simplified long explanations when he was tired, and that she had spent nine years learning not to turn every omission into a conflict.
She put the receipt on the entry table where he would see it in the morning for his tax filings. By the time Abby woke, it was gone.
The next two days were the kind of busy that made Abby feel vaguely guilty for not being busier herself.
Hudson’s father had apparently decided that the final stretch of the merger required his son to be reachable at all hours, and Hudson had taken to keeping his phone in his shirt pocket the way he did during tax season, checking it at dinner and silencing it in the same motion.
He fell asleep before her both nights, which was unusual, but he had also spent most of Tuesday on a conference call that ran past nine, and she could hear the exhaustion in the way he answered her when she asked if he wanted tea.
Makayla’s regional manager had materialized without much warning, which Makayla had complained about before, the way the company treated her schedule as a suggestion.
She sent a voice memo on Monday that was mostly road noise and an apology about Thursday’s lunch, and another on Tuesday that cut off mid-sentence before she called back to finish it.
Abby listened to both while folding laundry and found herself sympathizing.
She had worked under a micromanager once and remembered the particular exhaustion of having someone else’s urgency imposed on your calendar.
She rescheduled the lunch for the following week and texted Makayla a screenshot of a restaurant they had been meaning to try. Makayla sent back three hearts and a promise.
Her stomach remained unsettled, and fatigue settled over her in the afternoons with enough weight that she twice fell asleep on the sofa before Hudson came home.
She blamed wedding stress, then the weather, then the mild virus passing through her office, selecting whichever explanation required the least attention.