He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 160

Chapter 160

Chapter 160

Mason’s POV

I heard her car pull away from the crib.

The engine sound diminishing, then gone, the silence after it arriving in the house like something that had been waiting outside for an invitation.

I leaned against the closed door

Let it hold me upright for a moment.

The quiet was complete….

No footsteps. No voice from another room. No small sounds of a second person moving through a shared space, the bathroom tap, the kitchen cupboard, the particular creak of the third step from the top that I had meant to fix for two years and never had.

Nothing…

I had spent the past four days telling myself I wanted this. The absence of her. The space where the lies had been. I had packed her suitcases in the dark last night with the focused efficiency of a man executing a decision, and every drawer I’d emptied had felt like taking something back.

Standing against the door now, in the quiet I had manufactured, I felt nothing I had expected to feel.

I slid down.

Sat on the floor

The first time I cried, at the funeral home, it had been contained. The restrained version… the version that understood it was being observed and performed accordingly, not dishonestly, but managed. I had sat in the chair across from the director and said the words that needed saying and signed the forms that needed signing, and whatever came up in my chest had been expressed through the set of my jaw rather than through anything louder.

I had cried once more, quietly, at the graveside

Both times it had been the kind of grief that a person could carry and still function.

What came now was different…

It arrived all at once, the way things arrived when the body had been holding them at bay for too long and had simply run out of the strength to keep holding. Not dignified. Not contained.

He was eight weeks old

Eight weeks of carrying him through the apartment at midnight because that was what he needed. Eight weeks of learning the difference between his sounds. Eight weeks of looking at a face that was becoming itself…. the jaw, the eyes finding focus, the person arriving, and feeling something I hadn’t felt

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Chapter 160

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since before I understood what I’d destroyed in my marriage, which was the uncomplicated conviction that I was doing something right.

Gone

The word didn’t have enough weight. It never would

I don’t know how long I sat there.

The light changed…. I registered that much. The angle of it through the windows shifted from morning to something closer to afternoon. The phone rang several times. I heard it from wherever I’d left it, a distant sound that existed in a different part of the day than the one I was in

I didn’t move.

Somewhere around the middle of the afternoon, I became aware that I hadn’t eaten anything since the previous morning. My body communicated this as a fact rather than a complaint, the way bodies communicated things to people who had stopped caring about their own logistics.

I stayed on the floor

Maya arrived in my thoughts the way she always did…. not loudly, not through some deliberate act of thinking about her, but simply by being there when everything else had cleared out.

I had spent thirty years filling rooms with things. Companies, strategies, positions, people. The rooms had always been full….

Today they were empty

And in the empty rooms, Maya.

I closed my eyes.

Thought about the hospital corridor….

Alex.

Even lying in a hospital bed with machines keeping track of his breathing, he had everything I had spent eight years standing next to without ever properly reaching for.

I hated it

I hated the clarity of it….. how straightforward it was, how little complexity it contained. He had looked at Maya once and seen what she was. No arrangement. No management. No years of standing at windows looking at the harbour while she sat alone in hospital beds. He had walked through her door with a candlestick and a business proposition and had been more honest with her in six weeks than I had managed in the entirety of a marriage.

She sat beside him every day

She was sitting beside him right now.

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Chapter 160

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I should let go.

The thought arrived clearly enough. Not from conscience exactly… from whatever part of the mind retained functioning access to reason even when the rest of it was on the floor.

I should walk away

Take what remained of the company position, find the version of my life that existed on the other side of all of this, and leave Maya Hargrove to the life she had built without me.

I knew this

I sat on the floor and knew it with full clarity.

And then I thought about the wedding that hadn’t happened. About Maya in a dress chosen for the wrong man. About Alex in a hospital bed, winning even while unconscious,

My phone lit up on the side, table.

Not a call this time….. a notification. The kind that came from a number in my contacts, a private account

I’d set up months ago to monitor certain things I needed to monitor.

A photo.

I reached up and took the phone from the table without getting off the floor.

Opened it

The photograph was taken from the pavement opposite the hospital entrance, a clean shot, wide enough to show context without being close enough to be obviously surveillance. Maya, outside the main doors,

beside Catherine Voss.

The older woman had her hand on Maya’s arm. Maya’s head was slightly bent toward her.

The photograph was timestamped forty minutes ago.

No bodyguard visible in the frame.

I looked at the photograph for a long time.

At the space around Maya that nobody was filling

I put the phone down on the floor beside me.

The apartment was very quiet.

Although the child I took as mine is dead, but my plans aren’t….

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