He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 123

Chapter 123

Selina’s POV

Mason came home at six with the energy of someone who had been sitting with something all day and had finally decided to say it…

I was in the sitting room with the baby. The evening routine…. the seven o’clock feed approaching, the specific, settled quality of a house at the end of a day. Normal. The surface of things.

He sat down across from me.

Looked at me with the expression I had learned to read in the past months….. the one that preceded information he had decided to share, which was different from the one that preceded a strategy, which was different again from the one that preceded a question he had already answered for himself.

This was the third kind.

“Maya’s pregnant,” he said.

I kept my face level.

“I saw a comment online,” he said. “And I’ve been thinking about it.” He looked at his hands. “The timeline. The losses we had. Everything I told her in the corridor about the test.” He paused. “If the problem was mine….. if the losses were because of me….. then how is she pregnant now?”

I looked at him.

“That’s straightforward,” I said. “If the problem was yours, then she’s pregnant by someone who doesn’t have the same issue. Alex Voss, presumably.”

“Or it wasn’t entirely mine,” he said. “Or the circumstances were different. Or…..”

“Mason.” I kept my voice even. “You’re constructing a possibility from nothing.”

“I’m asking a question.” He looked at me. “One I have the right to ask”

I looked at the baby.

At the green light of the monitor on the side table

At the specific, domestic arrangement of a life I had built with considerable effort and was watching develop a crack I had not anticipated.

“The child is Alex’s,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know enough”

“How?” He looked at me directly. “How do you know enough?”

The room was very still.

I held his gaze

“Because the alternative requires Maya to have been with you during a period when she had already emotionally left the marriage,” I said. “She dropped her rings and walked out. The child came after.” I paused. “The maths

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doesn’t support your version.”

He looked at the harbour.

“She never said definitively,” he said. “When I asked her. She told me I had no right to question her life,” A pause. “She didn’t say no….”

“She said no,” I said. “I was in your office when you confronted her. You told me about it. She said no.”

“She said it in a way that could be read differently.”

I looked at him

At the man across from me who had spent eight years not seeing Maya and was now, in her absence, constructing a version of her that served what he needed to believe.

“Mason.” Careful. “The child is Alex Voss’s. Let it go”

He said nothing.

Which was not the same as agreeing.

I waited until he had gone to the study

Then I sat with what had just happened and ran it forward.

Mason’s belief……unstable, built on nothing …was the kind that looked for confirmation rather than waiting to receive it. He had already leaked something. I didn’t know the details but I knew the energy of it, the specific restless quality he’d had when he came in, the mixture of satisfaction and unease that arrived after action rather than before.

He had done something.

Which meant the story was already moving

Which meant the specific thing I had been managing for months…. the thing Daniel Cole held, the evidence he had stored in the tidy, awful way of a man who understood that information was power, was now adjacent to a story that was gaining momentum.

Maya’s pregnancy.

The question of the father.

And somewhere in Daniel Cole’s files, the medical consultation records from a private clinic.

The substance.

The timing relative to Maya’s losses.

The evidence that Maya’s miscarriages had not been entirely unexplained.

If the story moved…. if Mason’s leak attracted the kind of attention that brought investigators and journalists and the specific, relentless attention of people looking for the shape of a scandal… then the peripheral files became relevant.

And if the peripheral files became relevant, Daniel Cole became relevant.

And if Daniel Cole became relevant…..

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I pressed my hand flat on my knee.

The baby made a small sound from the bassinet

I looked at him.

At the small, specific face that was already becoming itself…. the features settling into their permanent arrangement, the person becoming clear.

He had no knowledge of any of this.

He would not, for years.

My job was to make sure that when he was old enough to know things, the things he knew did not include this.

My phone vibrated on the cushion beside me.

Not the second phone. My main one.

I looked at the screen.

Daniel Cole’s number…… not stored, recognised.

A message.

You owe me more. Or I start talking.

I looked at the message.

At the bassinet

At the study door, closed, Mason inside with his thoughts and his harbour view and his constructed belief about a child that belonged to another man.

Two separate crises.

Both running simultaneously

Both with consequences I could not fully control.

I put the phone face down.

Picked it up

Put it down again.

The baby made another sound….. not distress, the sound of a small person adjusting their position in the specific, unconscious way of someone who was comfortable and was not yet aware of anything that required them to be otherwise.

I looked at him.

Felt the exhausted weight of a woman holding too many things and understanding that the holding could not continue indefinitely at the current load.

Something was going to give.

The question was what, and when, and whether I could be the one who chose the answer.

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I picked up the phone.

And began composing a reply that would buy me another forty-eight hours.

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