He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 187

Chapter 187

Maya’s POV

The nurses arrived in under a minute.

I heard them before they came through the door…. I stepped back.

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Not far…. to the edge of the room, just far enough to give them the working space they needed while remaining in Alex’s sight line, which I had decided, in the thirty seconds since he had opened his eyes, was where I intended to remain for the foreseeable

future.

He tracked me as I moved.

His eyes found me at the room’s edge and held there while the team worked around him….. checking the monitor, checking the lines, asking him questions…..

“Alex. Can you tell me what year it is?”

His eyes moved to the attending.

“I don’t know how long I’ve been here,” he said. His voice was rough, the sound of something being used for the first time in weeks. “What month is it?”

“November,” the attending said.

Something moved across Alex’s face….

“The wedding,” he said.

“We’ll talk about everything,” I said from the edge of the room. My voice came out steadier than it had any right to. “There’s

time. All the time.”

He found me again.

Held my eyes….

The attending was speaking…. something about the responsiveness assessment, about hydration, about a more complete evaluation in the morning when the team was fully assembled. I heard it and filed it and kept my eyes on Alex, who kept his eyes on me, the two of us conducting a separate conversation in the language we had developed across the past several months that didn’t require words…..

Are you all right?

I’m here

I know. Are you all right?

Now I am….

The room settled after twenty minutes.

Two nurses remained….. one monitoring the equipment, one adjusting.

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Questions. Responses. The careful mapping of what Alex remembered, what he could access, what the weeks had done to the edges of his recall.

He remembered the garden

He remembered Maya walking toward him at the end of the aisle.

He remembered the sound

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He did not, he said, remember the pain.

“That’s not unusual,” the attending said. “The body has mechanisms.”

“Good mechanisms,” Alex said.

The attending almost smiled.

When they gave me back the room…. when the monitoring nurse stepped out and the attending had finished his notes and the door had closed with the satisfied click of a hospital room that had reached the outcome it was designed for, I crossed from the edge to the chair.

Sat….

Took his hand

He looked at me.

“You:sobbed,” he said.

“I did not sob,” I said.

“You absolutely sobbed,” he said. The roughness in his voice was still there but underneath it….

“I was emotional,” I said.

“You were sobbing,” he said.

“Alex….”

“I’m not criticising it,” he said. “I’m noting it. You sobbed. I’ve been trying to reach you for three weeks and the first thing I learned when I got here is that you’re capable of sobbing.” He looked at me. “I found it very moving.”

I pressed my hand over my mouth…..

He watched me trying not to laugh and his face did the thing it did….

The laugh came anyway.

Mine first…

His second, quieter, the effort of it visible and he held his side, winced, and reached forward, worried, and he shook his head.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Don’t hover.”

“You literally just woke up from a coma,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I was there.” He looked at me. “The whole time.”

I told him what I had told him over the weeks.

Not all of it…. not tonight, not while the attending’s voice was still fresh and the nurses were still on the floor and his body was doing the extraordinary work of reintegration. But the shape of it. The investigation. The files that had been released. What Reeves had confirmed about my father.

I watched his face as I talked

He listened the way he always listened to things that mattered….

“I’m sorry,” he said, when I stopped.

Not for the investigation, not for what the investigation had confirmed. For the thing underneath it…. for the twenty-two-year-

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old at a graveside who had been told a lie and had spent nine years living inside it.

“I know,” I said.

He looked at the ceiling for a moment.

“The board member,” he said. “The consultant. Do you have names?”

“I have names,” I said. “Reeves has names. Carter has the documentation.”

“Then we move,” he said

We. The word arriving without emphasis, as though it had always been obvious.

“You just woke up,” I said.

“I’m aware,” he said. “I also heard everything you told me over three weeks and I know how close this is to resolving and I am not lying in a hospital bed while the people who killed your father run board meetings.” He looked at me. “Tell me what you

need from me”

I looked at him.

At the man who had put himself between me and a gun in a garden.

At the man who was lying in a hospital bed having just returned from wherever he had been and was asking, before anything else, what I needed.

“Right now?” I said.

“Right now,” he said.

“Drink the water the nurse left,” I said. “Let the attending do the morning assessment. Sleep if you can.”

He looked at the water cup.

“And after that?” he said.

“After that we finish it,” I said. “All of it. Together.”

He held my gaze for a moment.

“The wedding,” he said.

“The wedding,” I said.

“We still haven’t finished the wedding……’

“I know,” I said.

Something settled in his face…..

“Soon,” he said.

“Soon,” I agreed.

He closed his hand around mine.

“I love you,” he said.

Three words he had said in a garden before everything went wrong.

Three words that had survived everything since.

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“I love you,” I said back.

I sat beside him until he stept…

I sat in the chair.

Held his hand.

And thought about everything that still waited…. the board member, the consultant, the names Carter had assembled, the investigation Reeves was building, the truth about my father that was still in the process of becoming a case rather than a suspicion.

Everything still waited.

日

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Chapter 198

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