by Laurie Lewis
She smiled up at him, then quickly pulled her eyes away, but not before Hudson caught the glistening there. Her desperation pained him. Her need for approbation. But what about her anger? He stood, needing to move away from her. “You’re hired. I’ll draft an offer and email it to you tomorrow.”
She seemed startled. “Thank you.”
“Great.” He picked up his computer again and fumbled with the power cord. “Then I think we’re all set. You’ve got my contact info. I’ll be in touch.”
Laurel exited the kitchen space where she was puttering, and the two women exchanged worried glances. “Are you leaving?” she asked. “What about dinner?”
Hudson glanced at his watch, though time was not what was driving him to leave Liv’s side. “I’m sorry. I really should make that evening flight.”
“Then could you take Olivia for a ride in that beach chair before you go? She needs a practice run, and I need to get these ribs in the oven.”
Hudson nodded, set his computer back down, and helped transfer Olivia from one chair to the other, reminding himself again and again that she was Jeff’s widow. The woman who walked away from him. The loss that made living an agony.
He kept his distance as she fumbled with the controls, maneuvering the chair through the French doors and onto the porch. A winding trail led from the home’s clifftop location to the beach below. Despite Hudson’s vow to remain aloof, he set the controls to manual and walked backwards, guiding the drifting chair from the front while Olivia steered. With their faces inches apart, his resolve melted each time he looked up into her anxiety-ridden eyes.
At the bottom of the trail and slightly to the left sat the number one tourist attraction in the area—Haystack Rock—and its intertidal pools teeming with aquatic and bird life. The beach crowd was thin, leaving a few tidal pool enthusiasts seeking starfish, anemones, and other specimens.
The pair didn’t speak as Olivia drove across the beach that spread before the monolithic sea stack. Hudson walked slightly behind her, suffering as they retraced the steps where memories were made, leaving wounds that remained as raw as when she’d left.
Olivia stopped when she came to a large outcropping of rock. “I love this place.”
Hudson barely heard her above the sea sounds. Rather than reply, he stared at Haystack Rock, remaining silent.
“Do you remember senior year when the three of us came down here at midnight to collect specimens for your biology final? It was low tide, and we had the entire marine garden to ourselves.”
Oh, yes. He remembered everything about that night in explicit, agonizing detail.
“Jeff said I could find lots of starfish in the caves, so I went because I wanted to surprise you, but the tide rolled in, and I became stranded. I was terrified.”
Every muscle in Hudson’s body tensed in latent anger. He shoved his hands into his pants pockets and steeled himself for the telling of the story.
“I tried wading back, but the current pushed me along like a cork. I thought for sure I was going to drown, especially when you ran back to your house. But you came back with a rope, hollering for me to stay put while you tied a line between one of the rocks on the shore and one near the Haystack. Then you pulled your way to me and back. You saved my life.”
He felt the agonizing turn of the knife she’d inserted in his heart eight years ago when she married Jeff. Did she know what her words were doing to him? Against his better judgment, he fired one cruel shot her way. “And remind me where Jeff was during that rescue effort?”
“He was … he was here … on the shore somewhere.”
“I believe he was laughing at us, as I recall.”
Olivia grew thoughtful. “Why are you saying that? I was trying to recall a good memory between us. Why bring Jeff into it?”
“Why’d you bring this whole topic up at all? To preserve a memory? Then let’s keep it accurate. For the record, you ran off a few days later and married the guy who let you down.”
He could almost her heart shatter. Olivia recoiled and fired back in a cold tone. “I think we were all pretty good at letting one another down, don’t you?”
He jerked back at the accusation in her voice, burning his eyes into hers until she shrank under his stare like wax in a flame. “How did I let you down?”
She took a deep breath. “I know we hurt you and ruined the team. I’m sorry. However naïve it sounds, it never occurred to me that you would leave.” Several seconds passed before she turned to face him. “It just happened. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s the truth. I knew how Jeff treated me up to then, just tolerating me. But on the night, he told me he loved me; it was different.” Her voice grew soft and oddly sad. “No one had ever kissed me or told me they loved me before. I got caught up in the magic of being wanted.”
No one had ever told me they loved me before… The tender resonance of her voice read like a lie detector, confirming her words like the fatal testimony in a trial. No one … kissed me … told me … Remorse slammed him for fearing Liv’s attraction to Jeff but never having the courage to confront her about it. He had been a logical, tireless planner who misread the immediacy of her needs. Swallowing past a lump of choking regret, he shook his head and blew out a rush of air to silence his self-recriminations. “When was this magical, transformative evening?”
“Please don’t mock me.” Her head dipped, along with Hudson’s self-regard. “It was June eighteenth. Jeff called me to come to the apartment to change the dates on all the presentation slides to the twenty-third, because the NCAA pushed the meeting date back.”
The holes in the puzzle of lies began filling in for Hudson. “Did Jeff explain why I wasn’t at this last-minute work session?”
“You were gone a lot at the end, Hudson. It didn’t seem strange that you weren’t there.”
His jaw tightened. There was his other mistake. “So Jeff told you the meeting had been pushed back, and you and he were alone in the apartment, and he just asked you to marry him?”
She blushed and squirmed in her chair. “It wasn’t quite like that. We took a break from work, and he took my hand and led me into the living room, telling me how important I had become to the company and to him. Then he left for a minute and came back carrying a big vase of yellow tulips. I just froze. He turned on the stereo, and ‘Realize’ by Colbie Caillat started playing. I remember getting goose bumps, because I had just mentioned the week before that it was my favorite song, and he scoffed at me, but there he was, playing it and asking me to dance.” She rubbed at the goose bumps prickling her arms.
Chills hit Hudson also, but for different reasons. Icy chills that turned him cold inside.
“He was wearing Acqua Di Gio cologne. Remember how I tried to get you to buy some at that department store before graduation? He must have heard me talk about it. We were dancing but barely moving. He smelled so great, and he kept reciting the lyrics ‘we could be perfect for each other’ over and over in my ears. The next thing I knew, we were kissing. I had never been kissed, let alone by someone like Jeff …”
Hudson didn’t hear another word after the phrase someone like Jeff, which replayed against images of deceit. He picked the conversation back up when he heard the word “friend.” “What did you say?”
“I nearly died inside when we came back and you were gone.” Her lips were trembling, and she pressed them together to still them. “You were my best friend.”
Acid roiled in Hudson’s stomach. “I’m sorry,” he said, knowing he didn’t sound sorry at all. “Remind me once again how I let you down?”
“We hurt you. We ruined our threesome. I get it. But you destroyed us. We helped you build that start-up company. We invested sleepless nights, missed classes, and we cheered each success right along with you, but you cut us out. You took everything and threw us to the curb!” As if to punctuate her final thought, she pounded her hand down on the armrest, evidently forgetting about her wounded shoulder. She winced and cried out,
and Hudson took a step toward her, then retreated as she raised her hand, holding him back.
He looked at her, weighing every word, every vocal nuance. Did she actually believe this? He paced a few steps away and turned. His voice softened as he said, “I left an envelope. Did you read the note?”
She drew back defensively. “Jeff told me what you wrote.”
“So you never read it. You trusted his word over everything you knew about me?”
“Yes, because I couldn’t bear to read it.”
Hudson’s hands gnarled into fists. “We should go.” He started walking up the trail.
“There’s something else I need to tell you.”
“Then I trust you can make your own way back to the house.” He turned for the trail, walking on, listening to the weak rev of the beach chair’s motor, hearing no crunch of the balloon-like tires over shells in the sand. And then the motor stalled. He knew the battery’s weak charge was exhausted.
More than anything, he wanted to make a final, clean break, but he couldn’t walk away, so he turned back around and found Liv frantically pushing buttons and wrenching the controls, all to no avail. Without a word, he moved the controls to manual and began pushing her up the steep trail. Soaked and sweaty by the time he reached the top, he pushed her into the house, transferred her back into her manual chair, grabbed his laptop, and stopped by the door, avoiding eye contact with Liv.
“Everything is in place, so you should be fine. I’ll have an employment offer emailed to you tomorrow. Also, I’ve asked a friend of mine to stop by and check on you. Laurel, please let me know if you need anything.” And then he was gone.
* * *
Laurel was washing dishes when the pair stormed in. “What just happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Did you see how cold he was when he first arrived? It got worse.”
“What? Did you tell him about the lawsuit?”
“I didn’t get a chance.”
“You were gone for over an hour. What did you two talk about?”
Olivia shook her head in confusion. “I brought up an old memory from when we were friends, but he twisted it into an attack on Jeff.”
Laurel pressed her fingers over her lips and remained silent.
Olivia blinked back tears. “I’m going to rehab as fast as I can and get my own place so Hudson Bauer will stay out of my life.”
8
Hudson crushed the accelerator to the floor of his Range Rover, spinning out of the driveway in reverse and then forward onto the access road, drawing stares from the people he flew past. He longed for his old Jeep with the manual transmission, needing something more physical than the velvet ride of this automatic carriage.
A cyclist crossed his path a hundred yards ahead, and Hudson slammed his brakes early to avoid skidding into the rider, whose panicked expression startled Hudson back into control. The sting of shame bit his heart as he crawled the rest of the way through town, taking refuge as he stopped along a side street.
His head dropped against the steering wheel, then lifted as his fists hammered down in its place. He slumped against the seat and replayed the conversation on the beach.
He had blown it. Jeff stole Liv away, but her words also left Hudson charged and condemned. He had delayed too long in executing his perfect proposal, and foolishly, he had been absent too often after sharing his plans with Jeff.
The replay brought a new sting as Liv’s condemnation returned.
We hurt you … but you destroyed us. You took everything and threw us to the curb!
He pushed a button on the dash and initiated a call to Alejandra. Her familiar voice, with its Latin intonations, calmed him. And then he heard the worry in her voice.
“I’m so glad you called. I have been praying that phone would ring.”
“I’m flying back tonight. Can it wait until morning?”
“No … but I’ll make it wait, and you’ll owe me big time.” He heard the increased Latin inflections that frustration introduced into Alejandra’s voice.
“Thank you.”
“Yes, yes. I make miracles happen. That’s why you love me. So what do you need?”
“Everything on Arena Corp—the terms of sale and the companies we invested the profits in when we sold. Show me all disbursements related to that divestment.”
“Arena? This is too strange to be a coincidence,” she said warily.
“What? Talk to me.”
“It’s just that … well … someone else wants that information.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, but they hired a sleazy ambulance chaser to get it. He’s been hanging out at the food truck down the block, waving twenty-dollar bills around the interns’ noses during lunch, asking them to dig up information on Arena.”
Hudson felt the breath rush from his chest. “What kind of information?”
“Date of incorporation, date of sale, net worth at sale, reinvestment information. The very facts you’re asking for.”
“How soon can you get that to me?”
“Right now. I pulled all those files today.”
“Are the investments purchased with Arena profits still going to the original owners of the company?”
“Yes. Nothing’s changed. Quarterly transfers, like clockwork, into the same account.”
“That we can’t access?”
“Nope.”
“There has to be a money trail.”
“Maybe that’s the trail the lawyer’s sniffing. Speaking of the pin-striped pettifogger, what do you want me to do about him?”
“String him out, but give him what he wants. We don’t have anything to hide.”
“I don’t like where this is headed.”
“Implying what?”
“Stroll with me down Memory Lane, Hudson. The Arena Corp experience left you a wreck. All your business assets were in the Arena basket. The Bauer Group could barely pay the light bill when you hired me because you insisted that all the profits go to the McAllisters. When that Japanese software rendered Arena obsolete, I was almost happy to see you sell it for a dime on the dollar, because even if I had to sell empanadas on the corner to pay the rent, I was glad you were finally free of those McAllister leeches. But because you worried about Olivia, you turned around and signed the Arena profits, and some of your new assets, over to them as well.”
“And the new investments paid off big, and we succeeded.”
“But that scoundrel attorney isn’t the only one digging up the past, is he?”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you? You love me because I’m the only friend you have who talks straight to you. Who benefits from digging up info on Arena Corp? Olivia. This McAllister woman is trouble, Hudson. It’s too coincidental that this lawyer shows up at the same time she reappears.”
“Or maybe she’s a victim.”
“Then tell her the whole truth and stop playing these games. Do you really want to face her in court? Because that’s where this is heading.”
“We don’t know if she hired this attorney, but if she did and she stops the investigation on her own, she’ll vindicate my faith in her character. And if she pursues it, I’ll know I was wrong about her, and the whole truth will come out anyway.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You’ll like this even less. I hired her to work for us. I’ll email the details to you. Make arrangements with HR to assign her to Ethan, and overnight an employment contract to her.”
9
Hudson hadn’t mentioned any salary figures, but when the employment contract arrived, the offer shocked Olivia. One hundred thousand dollars annually, with bonuses and full benefits effective immediately. She questioned whether she was hired on merit or if this was more of Hudson’s charity.
As she read the terms of the contract, her opinion changed. This wasn’t going to be any cushy forty-hours-a week, work-from-the-sofa-in-your-pajamas job. The terms included international travel and stringent d
eadline clauses, which meant Olivia’s hours would be crazy at times. She would handle it.
Excitement bubbled within her. This was a real job. A job that mattered and one she could do while she rehabbed. She didn’t know what would happen when news of the lawsuit reached Hudson, but for now, she had the means to repay Hudson Bauer.
Her immediate supervisor was a man named Ethan Machowicz. She sent off a quick acceptance email and received a welcome email packet almost instantly that included a link to Bauer Group cloud storage files. Forms were signed and exchanged, HR was called, and within an hour, Olivia was gainfully and officially employed. Now it was time to get to work.
She opened the link and saw critiques of the website she had begun the day before. Ethan’s feedback was positive and encouraging, and with a determination she hadn’t felt in years, she pulled up the files from Hudson’s thumb drive and dug in to make the requested changes and additions.
A file she hadn’t noticed before caught her eye—My Girls. A battle ensued between her curiosity and her ethics. Curiosity won. The next click revealed seven folders and a video file. Six folders were labeled with the names of places mentioned in the website she was building, and included photos of Hudson with the woman and children from the thumb drive files. One folder was labeled “Mother Thomasine.” It was filled with photos of Hudson hugging a thin older nun, laughing and singing with younger nuns dressed in white and blue habits, and in a school filled with African children. The man in those photos was the Hudson she remembered—joyful, hopeful, peaceful. She could barely tear her eyes from the screen. The video showed him in a circle of children, dancing and singing. None of this had anything to do with money. Something didn’t add up, and she knew that the demon scapegoat she and Jeff reviled was of their own creation.
A shroud of guilt weighed her down, squeezing the breath from her. Laurel noticed.
“Are you in pain? Should I call the doctor?”
Olivia sniffed and blinked to clear her eyes. “No, no. I’m just stuffy.”