Page 88 of The Rehoboth Retreat
She poured something golden—whiskey, I assumed—and slid one to me, then made one for herself.
“To emotional triage,” she said.
I raised my glass. “To your son not hating me forever.”
She sat, legs crossed, rings clinking against the glass. “You know,” she said, “I never thought I’d like anyone my son kissed. I mean, his taste in men is usually about as exciting as a hotel conference center.”
“Ouch.”
“But you?” She sipped. “You’ve got your own category. Dangerous. Unhinged. Possibly riddled with scandal. And yet…”
“And yet?”
She tilted her head. “You showed up.”
I didn’t have a quip for that. I just looked down at my drink. It burned the whole way down. A good burn.
“Why are you still here, Hudson?” she asked suddenly.
I blinked. “I mean, the drinks are free?”
She smirked.
But then I shrugged, quieter this time. “Because I don’t want to leave until I know he’s okay.”
She looked at me for a long time. No sarcasm. No snark. Just a mom, taking stock of the guy who had accidentally thrown a brick through her son’s meticulously curated window.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “Don’t screw it up.”
We sat in silence for a bit. The clock ticked like it was trying to remind us both that time still moved, even when hearts were paused.
I sipped again.
Miles was upstairs, probably rewriting every sentence of his statement eight times. The man was a walking mood board in loafers, and now he had to show the world his cracks.
But I wasn’t going anywhere.
Not until he told me to.
Miles
I sat on the edge of my bed, the weight of the past two hours pressing on my shoulders like someone had draped a lead-lined duvet over me. My eyes were still raw, the skin beneath them sore and puffy. I hadn’t cried like that in years—ugly, real crying, the kind that leaves you hollowed out and strangely dehydrated. I hated how it made me feel, and even worse, I hated howvisibleit all had become.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
This weekend was supposed to be carefully orchestrated—a perfectly balanced respite from my life. The meals. The cocktails. Hudson was supposed to be a hiccup, a brief, vulgar punctuation mark in an otherwise clean and composed getaway.
But here I was. Shaking. Uncomposed. A trending topic.
I heard them downstairs—Cecilia and Hudson. Their voices floated up through the old vents like smoke. My mother’s lilt, refined and unbothered. Hudson’s scratchy drawl, half sarcasm, half sincerity. If I weren’t so emotionally gutted, I might’ve gone full-on paranoid, thinking they were becoming best friends. Somehow, I was bothannoyedandgratefulthat Hudson had come to the house. That he’d knocked on my door, spoken through the wood like I was a scared animal he was trying not to spook.
He didn’t push.
He just let me be.
And damn, that meant more to me than I wanted it to.
I rubbed my temples, closed my eyes, and exhaled hard through my nose. I could almost hear my mother’s voice in my head now, her cocktail-glazed wisdom echoing like a bedtime story:You lived. You kissed someone. You said yes to something unpredictable.
