He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 152

Chapter 152

Mason’s POV

Daniel Cole left first.

He stood from the sofa, looked at Selina once…. not with triumph, not with apology. Something in between, the look of someone who had made a decision a long time ago and was watching it arrive at its destination.

He looked at me

“The documentation is in a secure location,” he said. “When you’re ready to talk about next steps, you know how to reach me.”

He walked out

The door closed behind him.

The room was exactly the same room it had been for the past hour

The monitor. The afternoon light moving across the floor.

I stood in the center of it and felt the floor doing the thing floors did when the information they were holding became too much for the architecture.

Selina had not moved from where she was standing.

She looked at me with the expression that had been underneath everything for four years…. not the managed version, not the strategic version. Something older. The face of someone who had made a long series of decisions and was standing in their aggregate.

“Mason….”

“Don’t,” I said.

She closed her mouth.

I moved to the window.

The miscarriages played back.

Not as a sequence…. as a sensation. And she had been sitting in those beds believing that her body was

the variable.

Believing it because Selina had made sure she believed it

Because Selina had made sure it was true.

I pressed my hand flat against the glass.

“You did it to her,” I said.

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Selina was very still behind me

“Three times,” I said.

“It wasn’t…..” she started.

“Don’t explain it to me.” I kept my voice level. The level version was all I had left. The loud version was somewhere below it, waiting, but I was not going to let it out in this room because the baby was down the corridor and I was not going to let it out in a room where the baby was sleeping.

“Don’t give me the version that makes it manageable. I’m not going to be able to hear it right now.”

She said nothing.

“He’s not mine,” I said.

“He is yours,” she said. “In every way that…..”

“Don’t.” The word came out harder than the ones before it. “Don’t tell me what he is in every way. Tell me what you did. In plain language. All of it.”

She told me.

Not everything… not the version Daniel had delivered with his documentation and his flat, unhurried accuracy. The version she had access to. Her version, which was the inside of it, the reasoning and the fear and the calculation that had run underneath everything she had done.

She told me about the clinic

About the verification of my results…. how she had obtained them, what she had done with the knowledge.

About the two years with Daniel before me and the way she had ended it and the way she had expected it to stay ended.

About the baby…. conceived in the window when she had believed Daniel was finished and had

underestimated how unfinished he was.

She talked.

I stood at the window and listened and the floor continued doing its thing

Every conversation I could remember.

Every time she had said Maya is not stable or she’ll leave eventually or you’re better off without her. Every argument about the hospital corridor and the social media posts and the DNA situation.

All of it running alongside what I now knew.

She had been managing me

Toward a conclusion she had been working toward for fifteen years, with the patience of someone who

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understood that the prize at the end was worth the management.

And I had been…. not complicit, but not outside it either. I had made my own decisions and I had used her counsel and I had told myself that her alignment with my interests was simply what partnership looked like.

I had been used.

Not entirely. Not in the simple sense. But I had been shaped by someone who had interests of her own and had arranged the information I received to serve those interests.

“Why?” I said. Not loudly. The word itself was enough.

She looked at me….

“Because I wanted this,” she said. Her voice was the honest one…. not defended, not managed. The underneath. “I wanted you. I wanted the life. I had been positioned toward it for so long that it stopped feeling like wanting and started feeling like entitlement.” She held my gaze. “I know how that sounds.”

“You did it to her,” I said. “Maya. Three times.”

“Yes….”

“Knowing what those rooms cost her”

Selina said nothing.

“You sat with her,” I said. “You were her closest friend. You sat on bathroom floors with her and held her hand and you….”

“I know what I did,” she said.

“Do you?” I turned from the window. “Because what I’m looking at doesn’t look like someone who knows what they did. It looks like someone who made a calculation and called it a decision and built fifteen years on top of it and is now….‘

The phone rang.

Selina’s phone first.

She looked at the screen.

Then at me

The expression on her face changed.,.. not the shift between versions, the genuine change of a person receiving information that superseded everything currently in the room.

“It’s the caregiver,” she said.

She answered

Thirty seconds.

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I watched her face.

The colour that left it.

“We need to go,” she said. “He’s developed a fever. High. She called the doctor and the doctor said to bring him in immediately.”

I was already at the hallway before she finished the sentence.

The door to the nursery…. open, the caregiver standing beside the crib with the expression of someone who had been managing something alone for forty minutes and was very relieved to see adults.

The baby.

His face flushed…

His eyes were open.

He looked at me.

Small. His own face…. the jaw I had thought was mine, the eyes that were becoming themselves, the

I person he was already becoming regardless of whatever the adults around him had done to produce him.

He looked at me.

I picked him up.

He made a sound against my shoulder…. not crying, the sound of someone who was uncomfortable and had found the most available comfort and was accepting it.

I held him.

Whatever Daniel had said

Whatever Selina had done.

Whatever the floor was doing beneath everything else.

I held him and moved toward the door and thought only about the hospital and the distance between

here and there and whether I was going to be fast enough.

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