12. Hudson
Hudson
The meeting was about to start. Ten people sat around the table in my London office. Five investors, two solicitors, a planning consultant, Lincoln, and me. Rain moved down the windows behind them in silver lines. The Thames sat beyond the glass, gray and heavy beneath an overcast sky.
The investors wanted to build an out-of-town shopping center outside a market town in Perthshire.
“The traffic reports suggest minimal disruption,” Harland said from the far end of the table.
Lincoln shifted beside me. “Minimal disruption to whom?” he asked.
Harland glanced at his papers. “The council figures are optimistic.”
“Council figures are often optimistic,” Lincoln said. “That’s how villages end up with a bypass, three roundabouts, and nowhere to buy a loaf of bread that isn’t wrapped in plastic.”
One of the investors smiled as if Lincoln had made a joke.
I looked down at the proposal, at the columns of numbers, projected returns, access roads, possible tenants, and planning phases.
Normally, I could hold every moving piece of a deal in my head at once.
I knew the money, the risk, any political appetite or community resistance, and I knew the timing.
More than anything, I always had an exit strategy.
Today, the page blurred. It did a lot these days. I couldn’t get her out of my head. Not just her sweet blackberry scent, mixed with wild violet, whiskey and rain. Her. Though her scent seemed to be buried deep inside me.
My hand stilled on the pen. Memory could be cruel. The perfume was stronger today, and it didn’t usually come into the room with such presence.
I inhaled again. It was faint under the smell of polished wood, coffee, expensive perfume and the strange paper smell of legal documents. Not strong, not heat-heavy, not the lush, unbeatable scent of Mary in our hotel bed.
But it was hers…not ours.
My body knew it before my mind could make a sensible objection.
Across the table, Lincoln’s attention also sharpened.
His head didn’t turn. He was too controlled for that in front of investors. But his hand flattened on the table, and the storm note in his scent rose so abruptly that the solicitor beside him looked up.
He smelled Mary too, impossible as that was.
“Hudson?”
I looked up. Harland was watching me. “The funding window,” he said. “You were saying?”
I couldn’t remember what I’d been saying.
Lincoln leaned back in his chair. “He was saying the funding window exists because the investors are assuming planning resistance will be lower than it actually is.”
I took the handover without missing the next breath. “Correct. The numbers are too clean for the location.”
Harland frowned. “The town needs development.”
“The town may need development,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it needs this.”
My phone rang.
Every head at the table turned. Mainly because I didn’t take calls in meetings. The screen showed Reception.
Lincoln’s gaze cut to mine.
I answered. “Yes?”
“Mr. Bale?” Andrea’s voice was low and concerned in a way that made every instinct in me stand up.
“What is it?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt. A young woman came into reception asking for you and Mr. Hart.”
My fingers tightened around the phone. “Did she leave a name?”
Lincoln sat forward.
“She said Mary.”
The city dropped away. Only the scent remained.
“Where is she?”
“That’s why I’m calling. I told her you were in a meeting and could leave a message for when you were out of the meeting, but she seemed frightened. She left the building a few minutes ago and I’m a little concerned about her.”
Chairs scraped and I was already standing. Harland began to speak. I lifted one hand, and he stopped because money had made him clever enough to recognize when not to continue.
“It’s fine,” I told Andrea, though nothing was fine. “Which way?”
“I think toward the river. She was wearing a navy coat. She has dark hair. And she is young. She looked...” Andrea hesitated.
“Looked what?”
“Like she was trying very hard not to cry.”
Lincoln pushed back his chair. I looked at him. No, I told him without saying it.
His teeth came together.
The investors were watching. The deal was live. The room mattered. But Mary mattered more.
“Run the meeting,” I said.
Lincoln’s eyes flashed. “Hudson.”
“I’ll find her.”
He understood the rest and I left before anyone could ask a question.
Andrea stood behind the reception desk when I reached the front of the office, one hand still on the phone.
Our reception area was designed to let people know what we were capable of.
Marble floor, deep green velvet chairs, gold lamps, a wall of glass looking toward the river, and flowers refreshed twice a week because Lincoln pretended not to care and then complained if the arrangement looked pitiful.
Mary had stood here. Her scent clung to the air.
Andrea’s eyes widened when she saw my face. “Mr. Bale?”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
“She came in and asked if Hudson and Lincoln worked here. I asked if she had an appointment. She said no, but that you had told her to call if she needed...” Andrea paused, professional instincts fighting curiosity. “If she needed anything.”
My chest tightened. “Did she give a surname?”
“No. Only Mary.”
“Did anyone approach her?”
“No. She looked around and asked whether this was your building. I said yes. She said, ‘Of course it is,’ which seemed odd.”
Despite everything, I smiled. “Then?”
“I told her you were in a meeting and asked if she’d like to wait. She said no. Then she asked if Mr. Hart was here too. I said yes. She went very pale. I asked if she was all right, and she said she was grand.”
“She wasn’t.”
“No,” Andrea said softly. “She wasn’t.”
“Which direction?”
Andrea pointed toward the glass doors. “Left out of the building, then toward the river path. I watched until she turned the corner.”
“If Mr. Hart comes out, tell him I’ve gone after her.”
“Of course.”
I was through the doors before she finished. London hit me with rain, exhaust, and the cold metallic smell of the river. I turned left.
The wet pavement shone under my shoes. People moved around me under black umbrellas, shoulders hunched, faces lowered against the weather. A cyclist shouted at a cab. A woman in a camel coat stepped out of a cafe holding two coffees and nearly collided with a courier.
Mary had five minutes on me. Maybe less. I scanned every doorway first. The cafe with the steamed windows. The bookshop tucked under the office block. The florist beside the alley, where buckets of tulips stood bright and absurd in the rain.
No navy coat, no dark waves, no violet. I went into the cafe, anyway.
The bell over the door rang. Warm air rolled over me, carrying coffee, butter, cinnamon, and too many bodies. A girl by the counter had dark hair, but when she turned, she wasn’t Mary. Two students sat near the window. A mother folded a pram blanket over a sleeping baby.
The barista looked up. “Can I help you?”
“A young woman in a navy coat. Dark hair. Did she come in?”
He glanced toward the door. “No, mate. Sorry.”
I left before the bell finished swinging.
Next, the bookshop.
Narrow aisles. At the end was a man in glasses shelving travel guides. A woman reading a thriller’s last page. But no Mary.
At the florist, the woman behind the counter shook her head before I finished asking. “I saw her when I put some flowers outside. She went that way,” she said, pointing toward the river. “Looked upset, poor thing.”
I thanked her and moved faster. My coat pulled tight across my shoulders as I broke into a run. People turned. Someone swore when I cut around them. I didn’t care. Rain slid into my collar and down the back of my neck. My pulse beat hard in my throat.
If she’d come to us frightened and we’d missed her, I wouldn’t forgive myself.
The river path opened ahead. Gray water. Wet stone. Bare trees along the embankment. Office workers under umbrellas. Tourists taking photographs of the London Eye.
Then I saw her.
She walked along the Thames with no umbrella, her coat darkening under the rain, one hand pressed to her stomach and the other wrapped around a folded cream card.
The sight of her stopped me so completely that a man behind me bumped my shoulder and muttered something unkind.
I watched her, because this was Mary. Not memory, not scent, not almost. She was here.
In London and walking away from our office so quickly as if the ground beneath her feet might disappear if she stopped.
Then I rushed fast enough that my shoes struck water from the pavement.
“Mary.”
She stopped. Her shoulders rose with one breath, then lowered. But for a moment, she didn’t turn around.
When she finally faced me, every rehearsed line I’d prepared in the last two months left my head.
The rain caught in her hair, darkening the waves around her pale face.
Beautiful, yes. That had never been the problem.
Dark hair, blue eyes, mouth pressed tight.
She looked thinner than she should have, tired in the delicate skin beneath her eyes, and frightened in a way that made her sass feel folded away somewhere she couldn’t reach.
I stopped a few feet from her, not close enough to crowd but close enough to catch her scent.
“How did you find us?” I asked.
Not hello, not are you all right, not the hundred things I should have said if my chest weren’t closing around the fact that she was here.
We had looked for her in Boston. Two weeks of it, quietly and thoroughly, and every thread had gone cold.
When we finally found her dorm, the room was already cleared, the number we found in Damien’s phone was no longer in service.
The registrar would confirm only that Ms. McCarthy’s studies had moved online.
She had left the country before we’d properly begun.
Mary swallowed. “Didn’t you want to be found?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“You never came back to Boston. So I assumed you chose Damien, and I understood.”
“We came back,” I said. “To tell him, but we saw you and then didn’t, and—“