He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 142

Chapter 142

Maya’s POV

The television in the corner of the room was muted…

I had left it on because the silence without it was too heavy, and the silence with it was at least punctuated by moving images that gave my eyes somewhere to go that wasn’t Alex’s face

The news ticker at the bottom of the screen kept cycling through the same phrases……. wedding shooting, investigation ongoing, Voss family statement pending, and I read it each time without absorbing it.

Outside the hospital, apparently, people had opinions

Inside this room, the only thing that mattered was the monitor and the drip and the slow, steady evidence of a body doing what bodies did when they were healing

I had changed out of the dress at some point.

A nurse had brought clothes… Catherine had sent them, the message read, from the bag in the family house that I had packed what felt like a year ago. I had changed in the small bathroom adjacent to Alex’s room and come back and sat down and the clock had moved from eleven to midnight to one without my

needing to do anything except be there.

I was there….

I had been thinking about the wedding.

The white chairs.

Him at the end of the aisle.

Hi, in the quietest voice.

The vows we had written…. his about patience and the harbour, mine about learning the difference between being managed and being seen. The officiant’s voice and the garden holding its breath and the three seconds before everything went wrong

Three seconds of everything being right.

I held that….

At one-forty, Alex moved

Small. The kind of movement that could have been the body adjusting in sleep….. a shift beneath the blanket, his hand turning slightly against the cover.

I sat up

Watched….

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Nothing for thirty seconds.

Then his expression changed…. the muscles of his face tightening in a way that sleep didn’t produce. The pull of something beneath the surface, something trying to reach upward through whatever had been holding him under.

I stood.

Pressed the call button beside the bed.

His hands moved again… both of them this time, the fingers contracting and releasing in the involuntary pattern of someone whose nervous system was coming back online.

“Alex.” My voice, low. Close to his ear. “Alex, I’m here”

The door opened….

The nurse came in fast…… one look at the monitor, one look at him, and she was already reaching for the call system on her side, already speaking in the clipped, professional shorthand of someone initiating a protocol.

I stepped back….

The room filled in the way hospital rooms filled when something was happening…. two nurses, then the doctor on call, the equipment checked and rechecked, voices at the measured pitch of people who knew how to be urgent without being chaotic.

I stood at the foot of the bed….

Watched.

His face was still moving…. the expression changing in small increments, the tightening replaced by something else, something that looked less like struggle and more like arrival

Nobody told me anything.

I didn’t ask

The doctor leaned over him.

Checked the monitors

Said something to the nurse that I couldn’t hear.

And then Alex’s eyes opened.

Not fully. Not the wide-alert version.

But they settled on my face

I stood at the foot of the bed and looked at him and felt the thing that had been coiled in my chest since the garden begin, very slowly, to release.

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He looked at me…

His mouth moved.

No sound yet.

But I could read it.

Mason’s POV

The bar was the kind that didn’t require reservations or recognition.

That was why I had chosen it… a place on the south side of the district where the lighting was low enough to make everyone look like someone else and the bartender understood that refills were more

useful than conversation.

I had been here for two hours.

The drink in front of me was the third.

The argument with Selina was still running in my head….

I drank again.

The harbour was visible through the bar’s far window…. the same harbour from a different angle. Always

the same water

I thought about the shooting.

About Alex on the garden path.

About the fact that a bullet had been aimed at Maya and Alex had put himself in front of it and was now unconscious in a hospital bed while I was sitting in a bar on the south side trying to drink far enough past the evening to stop thinking about what any of it meant.

It meant things I was not in a, position to name….

The woman sat beside me at the bar at some point after the third drink….

Not predatory…. simply present, the way people were present in bars when they had decided conversation was preferable to the alternative. She was perhaps thirty, with the easy manner of someone who had nothing complicated waiting for her that evening and was happy to not have it.

She asked what I was drinking….

I told her.

She ordered the same

We talked about nothing for twenty minutes, which was exactly what was available and exactly what I needed. Not a connection…. a gap in the noise. She laughed at something I said and I noted that she was laughing and nothing about the noting required anything from me.

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Her friend arrived at some point….

Also easy. Also uncomplicated.

My phone lit up on the seat beside me.

Unknown number.

I looked at it.

In the normal run of things… in the professional life that had been operating correctly until six weeks ago, I didn’t answer unknown numbers after midnight. I had people for that.

Tonight the professional life felt very far away.

I answered….

Silence for a moment.

Then a voice…. low and measured….

“If you want to know the truth about Maya’s father,” the voice said, “meet me alone.”

The cab continued through the city.

The alcohol haze…. the two hours of deliberate blurring, cleared in the space of three seconds, the way cold water cleared things, the way certain words cleared things.

I sat forward.

“Who is this?” I said.

The line was already dead.

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