I looked determined. The drive to the airport was surreal. The roads were empty except for a few other early travelers and night-shift workers heading home.
I’d driven these same streets thousands of times, but never at this hour, never for this reason, never with this sense of stepping completely outside my normal life. At the airport, checking in for the flight felt like crossing a threshold I couldn’t uncross. The gate agent, a woman about my age with kind eyes, looked at my ticket.
«Wowie. Nice Thanksgiving plan. Getting away from the family chaos.»
I almost laughed at how perfectly she’d summarized it. «Something like that.»
«Smart woman.»
«I’m working today, but if I could afford to escape to Hawaii instead of dealing with my mother-in-law’s commentary on my casserole, I’d do it in a heartbeat.»
As I waited for boarding, I turned my phone on airplane mode without checking for messages. I didn’t want to see Hudson’s confused texts when he woke up and found my note.
I didn’t want to see Vivian’s panic when she arrived to chaos instead of perfection. The gate agent’s voice crackled through the speakers. «Now boarding flight 442 to Maui. Welcome aboard.»
As I walked down the jetway, I realized this was the first time in five years that I was going somewhere Hudson hadn’t approved of, somewhere Vivian hadn’t vetted, somewhere I’d chosen entirely for myself. The flight attendant welcomed me aboard with a smile that seemed to recognize something in my face. The look of someone stepping into freedom.
As I settled into my window seat and watched the ground crew prepare for departure, I thought about what was happening back at home. Hudson would be waking up in a few hours to find an empty kitchen and a note that would change everything.
Thirty-two people would be arriving in ten hours expecting a feast, and there would be no one there to provide it. For the first time in my adult life, their problem was not my problem to solve. The plane pushed back from the gate just as the first hints of dawn appeared on the horizon.
As we lifted into the sky, I pressed my face to the window and watched my old life disappear below the clouds.
Thursday, 7:23 AM. Hudson’s Perspective.
Hudson Fosters woke up to his alarm with the lazy contentment of someone who had no idea his world was about to implode. He rolled over, expecting to find Isabella’s side of the bed empty as usual on Thanksgiving morning.
She was always up before dawn, making magic happen in the kitchen. But something felt different. The house was too quiet.
By 7 a.m. on Thanksgiving, the smell of roasting turkey usually filled every room, and the sound of Isabella’s orchestrated chaos in the kitchen served as a comforting soundtrack to his slow morning routine. Instead, silence.
He padded downstairs in his boxers, expecting to find his wife surrounded by controlled culinary mayhem, probably looking a bit frazzled but handling everything with the competent efficiency that had attracted him to her in the first place.
The kitchen was empty. Not just empty of people, empty of activity. The ingredients from yesterday’s prep work sat exactly where Isabella had left them.
No turkey in the oven. No pots bubbling on the stove. No evidence that the Thanksgiving marathon had begun.
On the counter, next to his mother’s guest list, sat a folded piece of paper with his name on it in Isabella’s handwriting. 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. 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.
«She left a note saying she had to leave town. I thought maybe…»
«She left? Isabella just… left?» Carmen’s voice shifted from sleepy confusion to something that sounded almost like admiration. «Good for her.»
«Good for her? Carmen, 30 people are coming for dinner in six hours and she’s vanished!»
«30 people? Hudson, are you insane? You expected your wife to cook for 30 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. 8:15 a.m. His conference call with Singapore started in 45 minutes. The call he couldn’t miss, the one that could determine his promotion timeline for the next year.
But 32 people were expecting dinner in less than six hours. 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. Then, «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 32 people coming for dinner.»
The silence stretched so long that Hudson wondered if the call had dropped. «Mother?»
«This is a disaster.» Her voice had gone 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 32 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,» Vivian 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 32 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 a.m. on Thanksgiving. Even if we had availability, which we don’t, there’s no way to prepare a dinner for 32 people with 5 hours’ notice.»
By 10 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.
He called his mother back. «Any luck with the restaurants?»
«Nothing. Everyone’s booked. What do we do?»
«We cook it ourselves, obviously.»
Hudson looked at the raw turkeys again. «Mom, I don’t know how to cook a turkey. I don’t know how to cook any of this.»
«Then you learn. YouTube exists. How hard can it be?»
Vivian arrived with her sleeves rolled up and a grim expression that suggested she was preparing for battle. She surveyed the kitchen like a general assessing a battlefield where all the soldiers had deserted.
«This is worse than I thought,» she announced. «These turkeys should have been in the oven four hours ago. They’ll never be ready in time.»
Hudson, who had spent the last hour watching YouTube videos about turkey preparation while growing increasingly panicked, looked up from his phone with desperate hope. «Can we cook them faster somehow? Higher temperature?»
«Hudson, darling, you cannot rush a 20-pound turkey. Physics doesn’t bend to accommodate your wife’s abandonment issues.»
They worked in tense silence for the next hour. Vivian barking instructions while Hudson fumbled through tasks that Isabella had always made look effortless.
The stuffing ingredients sat in bowls, looking like components for a science experiment neither of them understood. The green bean casserole recipe might as well have been written in ancient Greek.
«Where is the stand mixer?» Vivian demanded, rifling through cabinets.
«I don’t know. Isabella always handles the kitchen stuff.»
«Well, Isabella isn’t here, is she?»
At noon, Hudson’s phone started ringing with calls from relatives asking about arrival times and dietary restrictions. Each conversation became more uncomfortable than the last.
«Hey, Hudson, it’s Uncle Raymond. Should I bring something? I know Vivian said everything was covered, but the wife made extra stuffing just in case.»
«Actually, Uncle Raymond, maybe you should bring the stuffing. And maybe anything else your wife might have made. As backup.»
«Backup? Is everything okay?»
Hudson looked at his mother, who was attempting to wrestle a raw turkey into a roasting pan while cursing under her breath. «Just bring whatever you have.»
By 12:30, word had spread through the family network that something was wrong with dinner preparations. Hudson’s phone buzzed constantly with confused relatives offering to help, asking questions, or trying to figure out if they should make alternative plans.
The kitchen had descended into chaos. Vivian had managed to get one turkey into the oven. But it was clear to both of them that it wouldn’t be ready until evening. The side dishes remained untouched.
The elegant timeline Isabella always maintained had collapsed into panic and improvisation.
«This is humiliating,» Vivian said, flour in her hair and defeat in her voice. «Absolutely humiliating. The Sanders are going to think we’re incompetent.»
«Maybe we should just cancel,» Hudson suggested weakly.
«Cancel? We cannot cancel Thanksgiving dinner at 1 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Do you have any idea what people will think?»
But Hudson was beginning to realize that what people thought was the least of his problems. The doorbell rang like a death knell.
Hudson opened the door to find cousin Cynthia and her new boyfriend standing on the porch with a bottle of wine and expectant smiles.
«Something smells… interesting,» Cynthia said, sniffing the air with obvious confusion. Instead of the rich aromas of a Thanksgiving feast, the house smelled like raw onions and panic sweat.
«We’re running a little behind schedule,» Hudson said, his voice strained with false cheerfulness.
More cars pulled into the driveway. Uncle Raymond with his arms full of backup dishes. The Sanders with their six-year-old son and obvious expectations of the high-class dinner Vivian had promised them.
Cousin after cousin, friend after friend, all arriving to find Hudson standing in the doorway looking like he was greeting mourners at a funeral.
«Where’s Isabella?» asked Aunt Margaret, looking around for the hostess who usually greeted everyone with genuine warmth and the promise of an amazing meal.
«She had to step out. Emergency.»
The living room filled with increasingly confused relatives. Conversations grew stilted as people realized something was seriously wrong.
The dining room table, set with Isabella’s careful place settings from two days ago, stood ready for a feast that didn’t exist.
Vivian emerged from the kitchen looking like she’d been through a war. Her perfect hair was disheveled, her clothes stained with various food substances, and her usual composure had cracked to reveal something close to panic.
«Everyone, please be patient. We’ve had some unexpected challenges with the meal preparation.»
Mr. Sanders, a man accustomed to country club service and fine dining, looked at his watch pointedly. «We were told dinner would be served at 2 p.m. It’s nearly that time now.»
«Yes, well, there have been some complications.»
«What kind of complications?» The question came from Hudson’s cousin Julie, who had driven three hours with her family and was beginning to look annoyed.
Hudson and Vivian exchanged glances. Neither of them wanted to be the one to explain that the woman they’d all taken for granted had simply vanished, leaving them helpless.
«Isabella had to leave town suddenly,» Hudson said finally. «Family emergency.»
The room fell silent as 32 people processed this information. «She left? Today?»
This from Ruby’s sister who, unlike Ruby, had made the guest list. «What kind of emergency happens at 4 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning?»
Hudson didn’t have an answer. Uncle Raymond cleared his throat.
«Well, what’s the plan for dinner then?»
All eyes turned to Hudson and Vivian. Thirty-two people who had made no backup plans, brought no substantial food contributions, and arranged their entire day around a meal that had been promised to them.
«We’re working on it,» Vivian said weakly.
Little Timmy Sanders, the six-year-old with the severe nut allergy, tugged on his mother’s dress. «Mommy, I’m hungry. When are we eating?»
His innocent question seemed to break whatever spell had been keeping the room politely quiet. Suddenly everyone was talking at once.
«Maybe we should order pizza?»
«Pizza places aren’t open on Thanksgiving.»
«What about Chinese food? With a six-year-old who has food allergies?»
«This is insane. We should have been told earlier.»
«Where exactly did Isabella go?»
«How long have you known she wasn’t going to be here?»
Hudson felt the walls closing in around him. Thirty-two pairs of eyes, all looking to him for answers he didn’t have, solutions he couldn’t provide.
