He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 178

Chapter 178

Mason’s POV

The nurses returned to their stations. The visitors who had paused looked away.

I stood where I had stopped when I stepped off the elevator.

Maya stood ten feet away, her hand moving through her hair…. not a vanity gesture…. Her hand stilled for a moment. Then she dropped it and straightened and looked at the floor and then at the corridor ahead of her and then, finally, at me.

Neither of us spoke.

She looked exhausted….

She had been here for weeks.

Sleeping in a chair, from what I had heard. Refusing to leave except when Catherine physically arranged for her to be elsewhere. Reading files about what had been done to her between sitting beside a man who had taken a bullet in her direction without calculating the cost first.

She had been carrying all of it….

Without anyone carrying it with her.

I had come here an hour ago, before I stepped off the elevator into chaos…. because I had seen something online.

I had come to find out if the photographs were real.

What I had found instead was Selina’s hands in Maya’s hair, and the sound Maya had made, and the instinct that had moved me across the floor before I had made any decision to move.

The police were gone now

Selina was also gone.

And Maya was standing ten feet away from me in a hospital corridor, looking at me with the face of someone who had been through something and was simply present in the aftermath of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The words came out quietly

Not the performance of an apology…. the actual version, the kind that arrived when a person had run out of ways to avoid saying a thing and had simply said it.

Maya looked at me…

She didn’t fill the silence that followed. That was something I had always known about her….

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I kept going.

“I made choices,” I said. “Choices I understood were wrong when I was making them, or should have understood. Every time Selina told me something about you that changed how I saw you…. I received it. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t come to you.” I paused. “She had my attention for at least 9 years years and I gave it to her freely and I let what she did with it define the way I treated you.” I looked at Maya’s face, which had not changed. “That is entirely mine to carry. It has nothing to do with what she did. She made

her choices and I made mine”

Maya said nothing….

“The hospital rooms,” I said.

Something moved in her expression.

“The specific ones,” I said. “The November one. The one you were twelve weeks from.” I watched the movement in her expression become something larger…. not pain exactly, something underneath pain, the thing that lived in a person after pain had done its work and left and the space it occupied was still the shape of what it had been.

“I stood at windows. That’s all I did. Every single time. I stood at windows and looked at the harbour and I told myself I was giving you space to process and what I was actually doing was making sure I didn’t have to cross the floor and sit beside you, because sitting beside you would have required me to be honest about what I didn’t know and what I was afraid of and what I had never been willing to do the work of finding out.”

Her hand was pressed flat against her side

The same gesture she made when she was holding something in that she didn’t intend to release in a public space.

“I should have crossed the floor,” I said. “Every time. I should have crossed the floor and sat down and been whatever you needed me to be in those rooms instead of the version I was.” I stopped.

“I’m sorry. For that specifically. Not in general…. for that. For the windows.”

Maya looked at me for a long moment.

Long enough that I understood she was choosing her response rather than reacting to mine…..

“Mason,” she said.

Her voice was the level one.

But even in the level register, I could hear what was underneath it.

“Every time I needed you,” she said, “you weren’t there. Not because of circumstance. Not because you couldn’t be.” She looked at me directly. “You chose not to be. You chose Selina’s version of the situation over the reality of it. You chose your own comfort over the discomfort of standing beside someone who needed standing beside.” She paused.

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“You did that for eight years. And I adjusted. I managed. I found ways to carry things alone because I understood, eventually, that alone was what I was going to be regardless of who was in the room.”

I didn’t say anything….

“I don’t say this to hurt you,” she said. “I say it because you came here with an apology and apologies deserve honest responses.” She held my gaze. “What you did was real. The damage was real. The three hospital rooms were real, tricking me to sign my divorce papers when I thought I was signing business documents was real too.”

Something shifted in her face….. “And you standing in this corridor saying sorry doesn’t make it less real. It just means you finally come to tell yourself the truth about what you did.”

“I know,” I said.

“Then you understand,” she said, “why understanding it now doesn’t change anything between us”

She said it the way she said things that were final

Not harshly. Not with the particular edge of someone twisting a knife…. There was no love in the way she looked at me.

I had been watching for it… It was not there.

Not love, not longing, not the ambivalence that could be read as door slightly ajar.

What was there was something that cost her more to give me than anger would have…. Disappointment.

“I wish you healing,” she said. “I mean that. Whatever happened between us… whatever part of it was real and whatever part of it was constructed by someone who had interests of her own…. I don’t wish you pain.” She paused. “But there is no future between us, Mason. There was never going to be one after what happened. And I think somewhere underneath everything you’ve been telling yourself for the past few months, you already knew that.”

She looked at me for one more moment

Then she looked down the corridor.

Toward Alex’s room

Toward where she was going when I was no longer the thing requiring her attention.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

She walked….

I watched her go…. the same pace she always walked, purposeful and unhurried, the pace of someone who knew where they were going and had no reason to adjust their speed for anyone watching.

She reached the corner.

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Chapter C

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Turned…..

Was gone.

I stood in the corridor.

The floor around me had returned fully to its ordinary self…. nurses, movement, the low sounds of a hospital doing its continuous, necessary work. Nobody was looking at me.

I looked at the corner where she had turned.

At the empty corridor beyond it.

leaving with nothing I had come for and the one thing I had needed.

Just the truth…

Just: there is no future between us.

Just: I think you already knew that.

I had known that.

I walked to the elevator

Pressed the button….

D

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