He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 180

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Chapter 180

Catherine’s POV

The house was too quiet when I came through the door.

The silence that met me in the entrance hall was the third kind.

The phone had been going since I left the hospital…

I had been ignoring it in the car, which was something I rarely did…. I was not someone who ignored things, who let calls accumulate, who believed that distance from a problem was the same as the problemn being manageable. But I had been with Maya at the hospital for most of the afternoon, had sat beside her while she talked about the investigation and the man who had known her father, had held her hand in the corridor after the Selina incident…

I had needed the drive home to think

The phone had not permitted thinking.

I turned it face up on the kitchen table.

Forty-one notifications…

The same link, from different people, arriving in a sequence that told me the story had been moving fast for at least two hours.

I opened the first one.

The photographs were good…. That was the thing I registered before anything else…. not that they were true, not that they were damning, but that they were good. Well-composed. Lit warmly, the kind of light that came from a restaurant in the evening that knew what it was doing. Maya’s face turned toward a man across a table…

Anyone who did not know what the dinner was would not know what the dinner was.

I had been in enough rooms across enough years to understand the difference between a photograph that captured a truth and a photograph that manufactured one. What I was looking at was the second kind.

The first kind had context inside it…. the full frame, the background, the texture of a situation that stood up to examination. This had been cropped and angled and positioned to tell one story when it was clearly a fragment of another.

I put the phone down on the table.

Picked it back up…

Read the headline three times.

Questions arise about Maya Hargrove’s activities during Alex Voss’s hospitalisation.

I set the phone face down

Richard came in from the study.

r

He was holding his own phone…. not tightly, not loosely, with the particular grip of a man managing his reaction to something.

He saw me at the table…

He saw the phone face down in front of me.

“You’ve seen it,” he said.

“I’ve seen it,” I said.

He sat across from me.

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Set his phone down beside Iris

The kitchen table had hosted a great many significant conversations across the years we had lived in this house…. about Alex’s schooling, about Olive’s decisions, about Richard’s business choices and my family’s expectations and the, grinding negotiations of a long marriage between two people who had strong opinions and were not afraid to hold them simultaneously.

This felt different from those conversations.

This felt like the kind where I needed to be very clear about where I stood before he had the opportunity to establish the territory.

“They look bad,” he said….

“They look constructed,” I said.

He looked at me….

“Catherine…”

“Richard.” I kept my voice even. “I have been sitting beside that girl for three weeks. I trave watched her sleep in a hospital chair because she would not leave the floor. I have brought her food that she ate out of obligation while her eyes stayed on the door to Alex’s room. I have held her hand in a corridor after a woman pulled her hair while she was still processing the files that confirmed that woman had engineered three of her miscarriages.” I held his gaze.

“One dinner, photographed from an angle that removes all context, does not tell me anything I don’t already know about Maya Hargrove.”

“You’re defending her,” he said.

“I’m applying the same standard to her that I would apply to anyone I actually know,” I said. “Which is to ask whether the evidence in front of me is consistent with everything else I know. And it isn’t.” I paused.

“It isn’t consistent with a woman who barely slept for three weeks. It isn’t consistent with the person I watched promise Alex she would stop running, in a hospital room, when she thought she was alone with him.” I paused. “It is consistent with someone having decided that Maya needed another problem.”

Richard said nothing….

“You know who would want Maya to have another problem,” I said.

He looked at the table

“Zara Collins,” I said. “Who was in this house at your invitation. Who arrived at the company as an advisory partner through a channel connected to your friend Henderson. Who has been placing herself in every space that matters to Alex and Maya for weeks.” I held his gaze. “And who, as far as I can tell, has had access to information about Maya’s movements that she shouldn’t

have.”

“You don’t know it was Zara,” he said

“No,” I said. “I don’t know. But I know that the photographs arrived the same week Zara went to the police for questioning about the shooting. I know that a woman who was questioned as a suspect in a wedding shooting has motive to redirect attention elsewhere. And I know that the style of what’s in that article…. the manufactured plausibility of it, the careful framing the anonymous sourcing…. feels like the work of someone who has been doing this kind of thing for a while.”

Richard was quiet for a long time.

He looked at his phone….

I looked at mine.

He was afraid

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had learned to read this in him across thirty-seven years…. the way fear presented in Richard, which was as disapproval, as critical engagement with whatever was in front of him. He did not go soft when he was afraid. He went sharp. He found the weak point in the nearest available thing and applied pressure to it, not because the weak point was the source of the fear but because pressure on something concrete was preferable to sitting with the formless thing underneath.

Alex was unconscious in a hospital bed

Alex had been unconscious in a hospital bed for three weeks.

Richard had not been at the hospital as often as I had.

Not because he didn’t care….. I had never in thirty-seven years doubted that Richard loved his son completely, whatever I thought about the expression of that love and the decisions it had driven him toward.

He couldn’t sit in that room

He had tried, in the first days, and I had watched him try and had watched it cost him something that fre didn’t have the vocabulary to name, and eventually I had stopped asking him to try because the asking was a different kind of cruelty from the

not-asking and I was not willing to be that kind of cruel to the man who was afraid of losing our son.

So he had stayed away from the hospital more than he should have.

And the staying away had left him without the knowledge I had.

“She loves him,” I said….

Richard looked up

“I know you have concerns,” I said. “I know your concerns have been present since before Maya came back into Alex’s life and I

know some of them are legitimate…. the speed of it, the circumstances, the history.

I’m not dismissing that.” I held his gaze. “But I need you to understand something that I have watched with my own eyes and that no photograph can change. Maya loves Alex. Not because it’s convenient. Not because he has money or standing or because his name is useful to her, although Maya doesn’t need it anyways/ But because she sat in a hospital room for three weeks and talked to him about restaurants they haven’t been to yet and made him promises she intended to keep.” I paused…

“That is not the behaviour of a woman who has started seeing someone else.”

He looked at the table.

Then back at me….

Something in his face… not capitulation, something smaller than that, the first movement of a man who has been holding a position and has encountered something he can’t fully argue against.

“I’m going to ask her,” I said.

“Catherine….”

“Not to test her,” I said. “Not to ambush her. To ask, because she deserves to have someone ask instead of assume.” I stood

“And because whatever her answer is, I want her to know that someone in this family was willing to come to her directly”

I picked up my coat from the chair.

Richard watched me.

“If you’re wrong about her….” he started.

“I’m not,” I said.

Not harshly.

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Chapter 180-

I picked up my bag.

The photographs were still on my phone, face down on the table.

I left them there.

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