He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 185

Chapter 185

Maya’s POV

Reeves called at seven in the morning….. Alex had moved again overnight, not waking, not the full return I had been sitting beside the bed waiting for, but movement with intention in it, the attending had said, which meant something different from the earlier involuntary episodes.

The medical team had been in and out since four. Catherine had come at six and was in the family waiting area down the corridor. Olive was on her way….

The world was doing several things simultaneously. Reeves’s voice on the phone was doing one thing.

“I need you in the office,” he said. “As soon as you can get here. I have something that can’t be sent through a secure channel.”

I looked at Alex’s hand on the cover.

At the monitor…

“An hour,” I said.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

The drive was thirty-five minutes

I had not slept.

Not from the anxiety of waiting….

Reeves waited until I was seated…., Then he placed his hand on the file.

“I finally have proof,” he said.

Not loudly.

I looked at him eye wide open…

“Your father’s death was not natural,” he said. “I have been working on a theory. What I have now is not a theory.”

I sat very still.

“Show me,” I said.

He opened the file.

Walked me through it piece by piece, the way he had always walked me through things… methodically.

The attending physician’s original report. Then the amended version… the one that had been filed as the official record and that differed from the original in seven specific points, each amendment moving the document away from the language of uncertainty and toward the language of confirmation.

Natural causes, cardiac event.

The original, before amendment, had used different language

Cause of death consistent with cardiac event. Circumstances of attending physician’s access to patient in final seventy-two hours warrant further review.

That sentence had been removed from the filed version

“The consultation,” I said. “The one that was removed.”

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“Happened thirty-one hours before your father died,” Reeves said. “The consulting physician was not his cardiologist. Not his general practitioner. An independent practitioner engaged privately, whose name appears in the hospital’s visitor log for that day and nowhere else in the official record.”

“He was brought in specifically,” said

“Yes,” Reeves said.

“And the consultation produced the original report with the additional language.”

“Yes.”

“And then the original report was amended,” I said. “By whom?”

Reeves looked at the file.

“The amendment was authorised by the senior administrator on duty that week,” he said. “Who retired four months later with a package that was, for his grade, unusual.” He held my gaze. “The same administrator whose retirement package we had already flagged.”

From the beginning.

I looked at the amended report.

At the seven points of difference between what had been written and what had been filed.

At my father’s name at the top of both versions….

Edwin Hargrove.

Who had called a private meeting with three men some days before he died.

Who had brought documentation to Victor Ashworth the same week.

Who had said… in the notes Ashworth had been carrying for nine years, the notes I had finally seen when Ashworth had decided that nine years of waiting was long enough…. I know what they did and I know what they intend to do and I know I am running out of time to stop it.

He had known…

He had gone to the meeting knowing.

And he had died two days later from a cardiac event in a hospital room with an official record that had been amended by an

I administrator who retired four months later with an unusual package.

“Who did it,” I said.

Not loudly. The same quiet that Reeves used when the information was too large for volume.

“I don’t know all of it yet,” Reeves said. “I can tell you with certainty that the death was not natural. I can tell you that the record was deliberately altered. I can tell you that the consultant who wrote the original report was connected to the corporate network we’ve been mapping.” He paused. “The question of who gave the instruction, who made the decision that Edwin Hargrove needed to die and arranged for the mechanism, that is where we are still working.”

“The board member,” I said. “The ring.”

213

Chapter 193

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