He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 186

Chapter 186

Maya’s POV

The room had settled into its night rhythm.

Catherine had gone home an hour ago, persuaded by Olive, who had promised to call the moment aflything changed.

I had not rested.

I had sat with the file Reeves had given me… not the physical file, the contents of it, the version that lived in my memory now and could not be un-memorised, and I had looked at Alex’s face and tried to hold two things at once.

The truth about my father

The man in the bed in front of me, who was coming back.

I had known my father was meticulous….

This was not a sentimental memory… it was an accurate one. The way he organised the study, the way his desk was never fully clear because he was always in the middle of something, the way he kept duplicates of important documents in places he described, once, as not the obvious place.

He had told me this when I was twelve, showing me a small fireproof box he kept at the back of a shelf, and I had thought it was a quirky habit of a careful man.

It was not a quirk

It was the habit of a man who understood that the documents he was accumulating were dangerous to possess and was taking precautions accordingly.

He had brought what he knew to Ashworth.

He had gone to the meeting knowing what it might produce

I lowered my head.

The tears arrived without announcement, the way they did when you stopped holding them out at arm’s length and let them arrive on their own terms. Not the performed grief of a public moment…. the private kind, the kind that happened in rooms at eleven at night when no one was watching and the body had simply run out of the energy required to keep the feeling at a manageable distance.

“I miss you so much, Dad,” I said.

Not loudly…..

r

To the room. To the version of him that existed in the hospital quiet and in everything I had discovered over the past several months about who he had been and what he had known and how much of his life he had spent protecting the people he loved from things they didn’t know were coming.

I wiped my face

Breathed…

And felt something.

A movement

Beside me.

Not the monitor. Not the equipment. Not the ambient movement of a hospital room doing its continuous, necessary work.

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The land in mine.

I had been holding his hand without thinking about it…. the reflex of weeks.

The hand had moved…. Against mine.

With intention.

I looked up

His eyes were opening.

Not fully….

He blinked.

Again.

His eyes focused.

Found me.

I couldn’t move….

Three weeks.

Twenty-two days of sitting in this chair and talking to him and holding his hand and describing restaurants and making promises to a man I was not certain could hear

any

He looked at me

At my face.

of it.

At the tears still on it, which I had not finished wiping before everything changed.

His lips moved.

The sound that came out was barely a sound…. the hoarse

“Please,” he said.

One word.

Then a pause. The effort visible.

“Don’t cry.”

The sound I made was not a sob and not a laugh….

I reached for his face.

My hand on his cheek…. the warmth of him, real and present and alive in the way that was entirely different from the warmth of a body in a hospital bed, the living warmth of someone who was here.

“Alex,” I said,

He tried to speak again.

“I…” He stopped. Swallowed. The effort of hydration and voice recovery visible in the working of his throat.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t try to speak yet.” My hand on his face. His eyes on mine. “I’m here. I’m right here”

His hand moved against mine…. the grip tightening, the same grip from three days ago that had told me he was coming, the

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same grip but fuller now, more present, the grip of someone who had arrived rather than someone who was approaching.

“Hi,” he said

One syllable.

The word from the garden, from the altar, from every moment in this story when the distance between us had collapsed into something that needed no further explanation.

Hi.

I pressed my forehead to his

His hand came up.

I pressed the call button.

Then I leaned forward and put my head against his shoulder, carefully, avoiding the dressings, finding the specific geography of him that was undamaged and whole.

His hand in my hair.

His breathing under my ear… slow, real, present.

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Chapter 197