He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 154

Chapter 154

Mason’s POV

The flowers started arriving on the second day.

I didn’t read the cards. Petra collected them at the door and arranged them somewhere in the apartment I didn’t track, and they existed at the edges of my awareness the way everything existed at the edges of my awareness in those first days…. present, acknowledged, not fully processed.

Friends called

I let most of the calls go to voicemail. The ones I answered, I answered with the minimum required to

end the call without being rude about it.

People meant well

I understood that. I didn’t have anything available to give them in return for the meaning well.

I moved through each day on a schedule that had nothing to do with wanting to be anywhere.

Selina cried most of the time

I would come into a room and find her at the window, or on the sofa, or standing in the nursery doorway looking at the crib that nobody had moved yet, and she would be crying in the quiet, exhausted way of someone whose body had not finished processing something that the mind had already understood completely.

I watched her grieve

And underneath the watching, every time, the other thing arrived. Daniel Cole’s voice in my living room. The clinic. The substance. Three pregnancies that Maya had carried and lost because Selina had decided, somewhere in her calculation, that those losses were necessary for her own positioning

I could not separate the two things.

I had tried, in the bathroom mirror at six in the morning, in the car on the way to the funeral home to make arrangements, in the silence of rooms where Selina’s crying reached me from somewhere else in the apartment. I had tried to hold the grief for my son in one hand and the understanding of what Selina had done in the other, and keep them in separate places.

They would not stay separate

Every time I looked at her crying for our son, I thought about Maya in a hospital bed being told her body had failed, when the failure had been engineered by the woman standing in front of me now.

The grief and the fury occupied the same room in my chest.

I didn’t know how to ask one to leave so the other could have space.

On the fourth evening, she found me in the living room

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Chapter 154

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I had been sitting there for an hour with a drink I hadn’t touched, looking at nothing in particular, when she came in and sat across from me…

“Mason,” she said. “Please talk to me.”

I looked at her

“I know what I did,” she said. “I know there’s no version of explaining it that makes it acceptable. I’m not going to try to make it acceptable.” Her voice was unsteady, the grief still close beneath everything else she was trying to say. “But we just lost him. Together. Whatever else is true, that part is true… we are both grieving the same loss, and I don’t think either of us can survive it alone.”

I said nothing…

“I made mistakes,” she said. “Terrible ones. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But we have built something real too…. this apartment, this life, the love I have for you that has never once been a calculation, whatever you believe about everything else.” She looked at me. “We have already lost too much. Please don’t let us lose each other too”

I listened to all of it.

I let her finish completely before I said anything, because she deserved that much… the full space to say what she had come to say, without interruption.

When she stopped speaking, the room held the silence for a long moment

I looked at her.

I thought about Maya.

About hospital rooms and silent windows and eight years of a woman believing her own body had failed

her, when it hadn’t.

I thought about him… my supposed son.

Eight weeks. The grip of his hand. The almost-laugh I would never hear finish.

“I’m going to have my lawyer handle the formal separation of our affairs,” I said.

My voice was even

Completely level.

No volume in it, no accusation, nothing that resembled the rage that had been sitting in my chest for four days. Just the flat statement of a decision that had already been made and required no further negotiation.

Selina looked at me….

“Mason….”

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Chapter 154

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“There’s nothing else to say,” I said. “You’ve said what you came to say. I’ve made my decision. The lawyer will be in contact about the practical arrangements.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said. Her voice had gone thin. “Not now. Not after everything…”

“I mean it,” I said.

I stood

Looked at her one more time….

“I’m sorry about our…..! your son,” I said. “I will grieve him for the rest of my life. That part has nothing to do with you, and I’m not going to let it be tangled up with everything else.” I held her gaze. “But everything else is real too. And I can’t be in a room with you without both of them being true at the same time.”

I walked past her

Toward the stairs.

I did not look back.

Selina stood in the living room.

She stood there for a long time after I had gone

Her phone, in the empty living room, lit up.

A message.

Now that you’ve lost Mason, it said, it’s time to tell Maya what you did.

The message spying software I installed on my phone yesterday, popped out the message she got from an anonymous number… which I believe was from non other than Daniel Cole.

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