He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 173

Chapter 173

Zara’s POV

The security on Alex’s floor was heavier than it had been

I had noticed this on my previous visit…. Someone had redesigned the access after the IV incident. Someone competent.

I had been watching the floor pattern for two days.

There was a window between the eleven-fifteen nursing handover and the eleven-forty security rotation where the specific corridor leading to Alex’s room had a gap. Not a long one. Twelve minutes, perhaps fifteen.

Enough…

The room was exactly as I had last seen it from the corridor.

Alex.

I closed the door behind me

Stood for a moment with my back to it, looking at him.

He looked better than heb had in the first days….

I crossed to the chair beside the bed

Sat down.

I had told myself, in the car, that I was coming to see that he was all right.

It was a plausible reason. A human reason.

Sitting beside him now, in the quiet, with no Maya and no family and no medical staff requiring me to perform a register I had not brought with me today, I allowed the other reason to exist.

I had come because I needed to see him without anyone watching me see him.

Four years….

I had been in rooms with Alex for four years…. He had made me laugh.

He had a way of observing things that was so precisely accurate that the only available response was genuine amusement…

And then Maya had come back.

Not back into the room…. back into him. That was the thing I had never been able to fully articulate, not to myself, not in the supply corridor, not in any of the honest moments I had allowed myself across the past several weeks. She hadn’t entered the relationship and pushed me out. She had simply reappeared

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in Alex and the version of him that I had known became unavailable.

I looked at his face.

“I’m sorry,” I said

My voice was very quiet. Not for the benefit of anyone outside the door, for the benefit of saying it at all, which I had not done before in a room where anyone could evaluate the sincerity of it

“I’m sorry for the contractor,” I said. “I’m sorry for the things I planted and the conversations I arranged and the way I kept inserting myself into spaces that weren’t mine to occupy.” I paused. “I’m sorry for the bedroom. That was…. it crossed a line I knew I was crossing while I was crossing it.”

He didn’t respond. He was unconscious, most likely sleeping….

The monitor continued its rhythm.

“I’m not sorry for any of the four years,” I said. “I can’t be. They were real. Whatever you decided they were or weren’t…. they were real to me.” I looked at his hand. “I don’t think that entitles me to anything. I’m not making a case. I just needed you to know it was real.”

The room held the statement

I sat with it.

I leaned forward.

I don’t know what I was looking for in his face…. some movement, some flicker, some indication that the person I had known was still in there and had heard something I said.

There was nothing. The still face of someone whose attention was entirely elsewhere, doing something that required all of it.

I pressed my lips to his forehead

Not a kiss in the way that requires a response. The way you kissed someone when you were saying something that words weren’t sufficient for and you had accepted that the communication was one-

directional.

I pulled back

Looked at him.

His face did not change.

The monitor did not change.

I had read the articles

Not obsessively…. I was not someone who pursued obsessive research as a primary coping strategy. But in the days since Alex had shown the first signs of improvement, I had moved through a certain

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amount of reading about post-coma recovery that had started as information-gathering and had become something else by the time I put the phone down.

I stood up.

I looked back at him from the doorway

At the still face and the steady monitor and the hand resting on the cover.

The hand that had moved.

The finger that had tightened around someone’s hand

Around Maya’s hand….

Even now, in whatever place he was, he was reaching for her.

I closed the door.

Walked the corridor.

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