He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 177

Chapter 177

Chapter 177

Maya’s POV

The apology had not been what I expected.

I stood in the corridor with the two words still sitting in the air between us…. I’m sorry, and watched Selina’s face do something complicated…

Something shifted behind her eyes.

I had spent enough years reading Selina’s face across dinner tables and hospital waiting rooms and company functions to recognise the shift…. the moment when something that had been held in check found a crack and decided the crack was an opportunity rather than a warning.

“Sorry,” she said.

The word came back out of her mouth with a different weight than it had carried going in…. no longer an apology, something closer to disgust, as though the act of saying it had reminded her of everything underneath it that she had not yet said.

“Sorry doesn’t fix anything,” she said. “Does it. Sorry…. Sorry doesn’t give me back Mason. Sorry doesn’t bring back….” Her voice caught. Recovered into something harder. “You have no idea what I’ve lost.”

“Selina…..”

“Don’t.” She took a step closer. “Don’t say my name like you’re managing me. Like you’re so far above all

of this that you can just stand there being calm while my entire life burns

“I’m not above anything,” I said. My voice stayed level…. not from composure exactly, from exhaustion….”

I read the files too, Selina. I know what was in them. I know what you did.”

“You know what was written,” she said. “You don’t know what it cost.”

“It cost me three children,” I said.

The corridor went very still

A nurse, three doors down, had stopped moving.

“You don’t get to say that like it’s simple,” Selina said. Her voice had risen… not yet shouting, but climbing toward it…. “You don’t get to stand there in. your perfect hospital corridor with your perfect support system and your perfect fiancé fighting his way back to you and act like you’re the only one who’s suffered.”

“I never said I was the only one…”

“You don’t have to say it,” she said. “Everyone says it for you. Maya the survivor. Maya who built an empire out of nothing. Maya who walked away from a terrible marriage and landed in the arms of a man who took a bullet for her.” Her voice cracked on the last word, the anger and something rawer

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underneath it bleeding together. “And I’m the villain. I’m the woman everyone gets to hate so they don’t have to look too closely at what actually happened to either of us.”

“What actually happened,” I said, “is that you put something in my body that ended three pregnancies. Three times. While sitting beside me. While holding my hand.”

Selina’s face changed

Not guilt… something sharper.

“The second one,” she said. “The November one. You remember how far along you were?”

I went still

“Twelve weeks,” she said. “You told everyone it was eleven because eleven sounded less far gone, less like something that should have been more protected by then. You cried in the bathroom at the Hendricks dinner because you couldn’t stop thinking about the due date you’d already started planning around.”

I stared at her.

I had never told anyone that.

Not Mason. Not the doctors, beyond the clinical record.

“How do you know that,” I said

My voice had changed.

Selina’s eyes widened slightly…..

“Maya….”

“How do you know that,” I said again. “I never told you the due date. I never told anyone the due date.”

“It doesn’t matter….”

“It matters,” I said. “It matters because the only way you could know that detail is if you were tracking it. Not comforting me. Tracking me.” I took a step toward her…. “You weren’t just engineering the losses. You were monitoring them. You were keeping notes.”

“Stop….”

“How detailed were your notes, Selina?”

The crack in her finally gave. I saw it happen….

“You don’t get to ask me that,” she said. Her voice had lost all its measure now. “You don’t get to stand there and judge me when you have everything. Everything. And I have nothing. I have nothing left because of you.”

“Because of me,” I said. “I didn’t do anything to you, Selina. I never did anything to you.”

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“You existed,” she screamed….

The word landed in the corridor and stayed there.

A visitor near the elevators turned….

Two nurses came out of a room down the hall, their attention immediately fixed on us.

“You existed,” Selina said again, quieter now, but the quiet was worse than the volume had been. “That was enough. That was always enough.”

She lunged….

It happened too fast to fully process

Her hand was in my hair before I understood she had moved…. a fistful of it, pulling, I cried out. Stumbled backward against the wall. Her other hand came at my shoulder, my arm, anywhere she could reach, the controlled woman I had known for fifteen years entirely gone, replaced by something that had been building since the moment Daniel Cole’s files went public and had finally found its target.

“Selina….” I got an arm up, tried to create distance.

She kept pulling….

“Help…” My voice, raw, directed at the corridor.

The nurses were moving. A security guard from the floor station. Voices, overlapping, hands trying to separate us without making it worse.

Selina was screaming something I couldn’t fully parse…. fragments, your fault, everything, I had nothing left, the words tumbling over each other….

The elevator doors opened.

Mason.

I saw him over Selina’s shoulder, in the half-second before the security guard finally got an arm between us…. his face arriving at the scene with the frozen shock of someone who had come expecting one crisis and had walked into a different one entirely.

“Selina!”

His voice cut through the corridor.

He was moving before the word had finished leaving him, crossing the distance in a handful of strides, his hands going to her arms, pulling her back with a strength that finally broke her grip on my hair.

She fought him….

“Let go of me…”

“Selina, stop you are disgracing yourself….”

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“She ruined everything….”

Mason had his phone out before she finished the sentence, his voice tight and controlled…. “I need security and police at…. ” He gave the floor, the room number, his eyes never leaving Selina’s face.

Hospital security arrived within ninety seconds.

Two officers, the kind trained for exactly this…. de-escalation first, restraint only when de-escalation failed. With Selina, it failed almost immediately. She twisted against the first officer’s hold, still shouting, still reaching toward me even as the distance between us widened.

“You don’t get to win this,” she said, looking at me past the officer’s shoulder. “Do you understand me?

You don’t get to walk away from this clean.”

“Ma’am, you need to calm down….”

“I will not calm down.” Her voice had gone somewhere I didn’t recognise… past anger, into something that sounded almost like grief wearing anger’s clothes. “I have lost everything. Everything. And you’re standing there with your hospital and your fiancé and your perfect life and you think this is over.”

The actual police arrived four minutes later

I stood against the wall, one hand pressed to my scalp where the pain was sharpest, and watched two uniformed officers take over from hospital security…. Selina did not go quietly. She kicked at one of them, twisted hard enough that it took both officers to get her properly restrained, her voice rising and breaking and rising again as they walked her toward the elevator.

Mason stood beside me.

Neither of us spoke.

At the elevator, just before the doors closed around her, Selina turned her head.

Found my eyes across the corridor

Whatever had been in her face during the apology…. the brief, genuine unburdening of two true words, was gone entirely now, replaced by something that looked, for just a moment, like the woman in the

leaked files.

The one who had sat beside hospital beds with calculation running underneath comfort.

“You’ll regret this,” she said. “All of you. Every single person who stood there and let this happen to me…. you have no idea what’s coming.”

The doors closed….

The corridor was very quiet after that.

A nurse approached with a careful, professional gentleness, asking if I needed to be examined, if my scalp needed attention, if I wanted to sit down. I said yes to sitting down and no to everything else, my hands still slightly unsteady, my mind running back over the conversation in fragments…. the second

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one, the November one, twelve weeks and the cold, horror of understanding exactly how closely I had

been watched.

Mason stood a few feet away

He hadn’t moved.

“How did you know to come,” I said.

He looked at me….

For a moment he didn’t answer, and something in his expression told me the answer wasn’t going to be simple.

“I saw something online,” he said finally. “About you. I came to find out if it was true.”

I looked at him.

At the particular discomfort in his face, the thing he wasn’t yet saying.

“What did you see,” I said.

日

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