He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 181

Chapter 181

Zara’s POV

The story had been moving for six hours…. The organic shares were good. The comment ratio was right… not too clean, not too

uniform.

By midnight I had refreshed the primary thread forty-two times.

I had stopped counting after forty-two.

The comments were doing what I had designed them to do…. not the planted ones, the real orìes, the people who had seen the photographs and had reacted with the righteous indignation of an audience that had been watching Maya’s story for weeks and had found, in these images, a narrative beat they hadn’t seen coming.

I knew it was too perfect.

She was always about the attention.

Alex is fighting for his life and she’s at dinner with someone?

I read each one

I was not proud of reading each one.

I read them anyway…

The call came at twelve-forty.

A contact at the hospital…. not medical staff, someone in the administrative layer, a person whose access to information was an incidental benefit of a professional relationship I had maintained since my years with Alex.

The call was supposed to be brief. A check-in. A confirmation that the situation remained unchanged.

Instead:

“There was an episode earlier this evening,” the voice said. “The team has classified it as a significant response. Motor and possibly sensory.”

I went still on the sofa

“What does that mean?” I said.

“It means it’s stronger than the previous indicators,” the voice said. “The attending used the word imminent. Not a guarantee. But closer than it was yesterday.”

I thanked them.

Ended the call.

Put the phone down on the cushion.

The comments were still running on the screen in front of me.

She was always about the attention….

I looked at them.

Then at the dark window beyond the screen.

If Alex woke up tomorrow…. imminent, the attending had said, which was not the same as tonight but was not the same as next week either, then the photographs would be available to him.

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The timeline I had manufactured would be available to him

He would wake up from however many weeks of darkness and the first thing the internet would show him, if anyone showed him a phone, was Maya at a restaurant with a man while he was unconscious.

I had planned for this

I had understood this was the potential sequence.

Sitting with it at twelve-forty-three in the morning, with the word imminent still sitting where the phone call had left it, the plan felt different from the way it had felt at six a.m. when I had set the schedule….

It felt smaller….

It felt like something that was going to produce one thing in a room where something much larger was also happening, and the one thing I had produced was going to sit beside the much larger thing and look like exactly what it was.

The second notification arrived at one-fifteen.

Not a comment on the thread…. a different source. A journalist whose name I recognised from the months of press coverage surrounding the governance transition, who had been building a profile piece on Maya for one of the industry publications and who had apparently decided that the photographs warranted a question before the piece went to print.

The question had been sent to someone in Maya’s communications team.

The question was: Can you confirm where the original photographs came from and who took them?

I read it.

Read it again.

Provenance.

The question of where photographs came from was the question that everything else depended on not being asked. The photographs themselves could be contested…. context, framing, misrepresentation. These were manageable, defensible, the standard territory of a public relations response.

But the question of origin….. of who had taken them, who had commissioned the shooting, who had delivered them to the accounts that had first posted them…. that question went somewhere I had not fully constructed a defence for.

Not because the trail was obvious.

Because the trail existed

The accounts had been created on my devices, through my servers, using methods that I had believed were sufficiently

distanced to withstand casual examination. Sufficient for casual examination.

I put the phone down.

Stood up.

Walked to the window.

Had I made a mistake.

The question arrived and I held it the way I held questions I didn’t want to answer…. at arm’s length, examined without full commitment, given just enough attention to run the assessment without requiring the conclusion.

The shooter was gone…

The police had released me.

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The fabricated story was in the world and doing its work and the trail was not obvious and even if someone began pulling at the provenance thread it would take time and time was what I was trading in right now.

Alex was imminent…

Imminent meant that whatever happened next was going to happen soon.

I returned to the sofa.

Opened the screen….

The phone rang at one-fifty-three.

Unknown number….

Not the same unknown as before…. different. A different configuration of digits, the kind that could belong to a burner or a private line or a number so recently acquired that no data source had had time to attach a name to it.

I looked at it.

Let it ring twice….

Three times.

The fourth ring arrived and I picked up….

“Yes,” I said.

Silence.

Not the empty silence of a dropped call… the full silence of someone who had called with a purpose and was taking a moment before delivering it.

Then a voice.

Unhurried. Warm….

“Ms. Collins,” the voice said.

“Who is this,” I said.

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Chapter 19

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