He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 118

Chapter 118

Maya’s POV

The house was everything the party had suggested it would be large, warm, the specific quality of a space that had been lived in properly for a long time and carried the evidence of it in every room.

Catherine met us at the door….

“You look tired,” she said, pulling back to look at my face. Not unkindly…. the direct observation of someone who noticed things and said them.

“I’ve had a week,” I said.

“You’ve had several weeks.” She took my coat. “Come inside… There’s food and you’re going to sit down before anything else happens.”

Olive appeared from the sitting room with the energy of someone who had been waiting for company and had spent the waiting time generating ideas.

“We have so much to show you,” she said, to me and also somewhat to the room in general. “I’ve been doing research. Did you know there’s a florist forty minutes from here who does the most extraordinary structural arrangements…. nothing traditional, very architectural…”

“Olive,” Alex said.

“I’m just saying she should know the options.”

“Food first,” Catherine said firmly. “Then options.”

The kitchen table had the specific, warm disorder of a space being actively used for planning…. fabric swatches, printed photographs of venues and table settings, a notebook with Catherine’s handwriting covering three pages. She cleared enough space for plates and sat us down with the ease of someone who managed these things without thinking about them.

I ate.

Olive talked.

Catherine asked careful questions about the baby in the specific, considerate way of someone who understood that the topic required gentleness and was applying it deliberately.

Alex sat beside me and said less than usual and watched the room with the quiet attention he always brought to spaces where multiple variables were operating simultaneously

After lunch the planning began in earnest.

Not aggressively… but Catherine’s enthusiasm had a momentum to it that was difficult to redirect without being rude about it. She moved from the kitchen to the sitting room with the fabric swatches and the venue photographs and the notebook, and Olive moved with her, and I found myself at the sitting room table looking at options for ceremony flowers while a part of my mind was in Carter’s investigation thread and another part was in the corridor with Mason and another part was on the last page of a book in a study

“What do you think about this one?” Olive slid a photograph toward me.

White peonies. Loose arrangements, the kind that looked unconstructed.

My mother had grown peonies.

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“That one,” I said.

Olive wrote it down with visible satisfaction

Catherine looked at me over Olive’s head with the expression she used when she was giving me credit for something.

Richard came into the sitting room at three….

Not for the planning…. he moved through the space with the quality of someone passing through rather than arriving, and settled in the armchair at the far end of the room with a newspaper and the contained quality of a man who had decided his presence in the room was sufficient and his participation was not.

Catherine kept talking

Olive kept suggesting.

I kept answering questions and looking at photographs and trying to keep the forty percent of my attention that was actually in this room from dropping further.

“We were thinking the sitting room at the venue for the pre-ceremony,” Catherine said. “There’s natural light from the east that would be beautiful in the morning.”

“That sounds good,” I said.

“And for the reception dinner…… round tables rather than long. More intimate. More conversation.”

“Round tables,” I agreed.

“The guest list is the part that needs the most attention,” Olive said. “We’ve been going back and forth about numbers. Small feels right for this but there are people who….”

“You’re already planning a guest list,” Richard said.

He hadn’t looked up from the newspaper

The room went slightly still.

“We’re discussing options,” Catherine said, in the tone she used with him when she was choosing her battles.

“You’re planning a guest list for a wedding that has no confirmed date.” He turned a page. “For a woman who hasn’t confirmed she’s staying.”

“Richard….”

“I’m noting a fact.” He looked up. Not at Catherine. At me. “You left one marriage. You signed papers you claim you didn’t understand. You walked out of a company building and went dark for three weeks.” He held my gaze with the flat, assessing quality I had been receiving since the party. “I’m not saying you’re not capable of commitment. I’m saying we don’t have evidence of it yet.”

The sitting room was very still

Alex’s hand moved to the table beside mine.

I kept my eyes on Richard.

“You’re right,” I said. “You don’t have evidence yet.”

I said it simply, without heat, without the managed version. Just accurate

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He looked at me.

Something shifted in his expression….

He looked back at the newspaper.

Catherine looked at me with an expression that contained apology and gratitude in approximately equal measure.

Olive said: “So…. round tables, yes?”

“Round tables,” I confirmed.

The planning continued

An hour later, in the brief window when Catherine and Olive had gone to find a specific sample book from the study and Alex was on a call in the hallway, Richard and I were alone in the sitting room.

He folded the newspaper

Set it on the arm of the chair.

Looked at me with the direct, unembellished quality of a man who had decided something.

“You’ve been through something significant,” he said. “I’m not dismissing that”

I looked at him.

“But my son has also been through something significant,” he said. “A decade of it. And I have watched him…. closely, because that is what fathers do, and I know what this costs him.” He paused. “If you are not certain. If there is any part of you that is doing this for the wrong reasons…. protection, security, obligation to the child….”

“I know why I’m here,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Then let’s see how long you last here this time,” he said. Calmly. Without cruelty. The specific tone of a man issuing a challenge he believed was fair.

Catherine’s footsteps on the stairs.

I looked at the peonies photograph on the table.

At the ring on my hand

At Richard Voss, who loved his son in the specific, flawed way of someone who had confused protection with control and had not yet understood the difference.

“Watch,” I said.

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