He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 182

Chapter 182

Maya’s POV

The phone had been on silent since the Selina incident.

Not a deliberate decision… I had silenced it somewhere between the corridor and the chair beside Alex’s bed and had not thought about it since.

I had been talking to him…. Not about the investigation, not about Reeves or the board member or the names Carter was pulling from the estate files. About the restaurant.

I checked the phone…. Not because I expected anything specific…. from habit, the automatic check of someone who managed a company from a hospital chair and had learned to batch communications into windows rather than tending them continuously.

The notifications had exceeded the counter.

I opened the first message….

Read it.

Opened the link attached.

The photographs were everywhere…..

My face in a restaurant, turned toward a man across a table, the light warm and the framing intimate and the context entirely absent.

I read the headline….

Read the manufactured timeline.

Read the comments….some of them, enough of them.

Then I put the phone face down on the arm of the chair.

I did not throw it….

I did not make a sound that would bring anyone into the room.

I sat for a moment with the phone face down and looked at Alex’s still face and breathed through…. The dinner was an investigation

The photographs were edited.

The timeline was manufactured…..

None of it was difficult to refute.

What was difficult was the tiredness.

Not anger…. I was too tired for anger, had been too tired for anger for weeks.

Someone had been watching me.

Someone had commissioned photographs of a dinner I had attended in the course of an investigation into my father’s death

with Victor….

Someone had cropped and framed and manufactured and released them at the hour most likely to produce maximum damage.

Zara or Selena…

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The uames arrived without requiring much thought.

I picked up the phone.

Sent Carter a message: Fabricated photographs circulating. I need provenance traced. Priority.

Carter: Already on it. Saw it two hours ago. Working backward.

Two hours

He had been working on it for two hours….

I put the phone in my lap.

And sat….

Catherine arrived at ten-fifteen.

She came through the door…. She looked at me.

I looked at her.

“I saw it,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“I want to hear your version,” she said. “Not because I don’t already have one. Because you deserve to have someone ask”

I looked at her for a moment.

At Catherine Voss, who had spent three weeks bringing me food I ate out of obligation and blankets I used out of gratitude….

I told her.

All of it…. the investigation contact, how the dinner had come to be, what had been produced from it (two names Carter was now running, nothing more), the way the photographs must have been taken given the angle and the timing. I told her about the Ashworth thread…. Victor, who had met with my Dad also some weeks before his death, I also showed her the picture Victor was in, with a mysterious man. I told her about Reeves and the board member and the ring in the torn photograph that was still sitting at the centre of the investigation into Edwin’s death.

Catherine listened.

She was good at listening

When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

Then: “The man in the photographs was connected to your father’s case”

“He claimed to be,” I said. “He turned out to know less than he suggested. But the dinner itself was legitimate.”

“And this is Zara’s work,” she said.

“How sure?,” I asked…

She nodded.

Not with surprise.

“Richard saw your picture with Victor” she said.

I held her gaze

“I know what he thought,” I said.

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Chapter 192

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“He’s wrong,” she said. “Arrd I told him so.” She paused. “He’ll come around.”

“He doesn’t need to,” I said. “I’m not here for Richard. I’m here for Alex.”

She looked at me

The expression on her face was the one I had learned across three weeks….

“I know,” she said.

She reached across and took my hand.

We sat together beside the bed.

The sound came from the corridor at eleven-forty

Not an alarm…. a voice, raised, carrying the urgency of medical communication that existed one register below emergency. A nurse’s voice, calling for a doctor, the name delivered with the clipped certainty of someone who needed a specific person in a

specific room immediately.

Catherine and I looked at each other.

We were both on our feet before either of us had made the decision to stand

The corridor was already in motion.

The room.

Alex’s room

We reached the door.

Three staff members inside….. the attending on evening rounds, a nurse, a second I didn’t recognise, all of them positioned

around the bed….

The monitor was different.

Not alarming…. different. The numbers in different places from where they had been sitting for days. Movement in the lines. The visual language of a body doing something it had not been doing an hour ago.

Alex’s hands were moving

Not the involuntary movements of the early days…. the larger, alarmed movement that had sent the monitor into its urgent

register.

Something more directed. His right hand against the cover, the fingers not convulsing but reaching. The movement of someone who was trying to grip something that wasn’t there.

I crossed the room without being asked

Took his hand.

His fingers closed around mine.

Not weakly…. with intention

“Alex,” I said. My voice came out very steady. “I’m here.”

The attending looked up….. He looked at the monitor.

He looked at Alex.

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He looked at me.

“I think he’s trying to wake up,” he said.

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Chapter 193

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