He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 198

Chapter 198

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Chapter 198

Alex’s POV

The discharge paperwork took an hour.

I answered the questions and signed the forms.

The attending looked at the chart.

Then at me….

Then at the chart one more time, the way doctors looked at things they were confirming rather than discovering.

“You’ve recovered well,” he said.

“You can continue treatment from home.” Maya’s face.

That was what I looked at when the words arrived… not the chart, not the attending, not the window with

its November light. Maya’s face, doing the thing it did when something had been held at bay for a long

time and had finally been allowed to arrive.

“Okay,” she said.

One word

It contained everything.

They brought the wheelchair….

I did not want the wheelchair.

“You’re two weeks out of unconsciousness,” the nurse said…. The wheelchair is to the door. Then you

walk.”

“I can walk to the door,” I said.

“Everyone can walk to the door,” she said. “Not everyone should.”

Maya, standing beside me, said nothing….

But the corner of her mouth did something.

I got in the wheelchair….

My parents were in the corridor.

My mother had been at the hospital since seven…. I had woken to find her in the chair Maya usually occupied, which communicated something about the negotiation that had apparently happened between them at some earlier hour regarding whose turn it was to sit in the chair.

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She stood when the nurse wheeled me out and covered the distance between us quickly with the controlled speed of someone who had been restraining a considerably faster speed for some time.

“You’re going home,” she said

“I’m going home,” I said.

She held my face in her hands….

The same gesture from the night I woke up.

“Your father is outside,” she said.

I looked at her….

“He’s been here since six,” she said. “He won’t come in. But he’s here.”

The door was the marker.

After the door, walking. The nurse had been clear about this and I had agreed to it, which was the kind of agreement that could be maintained without significant ego loss because it was obviously correct. My body was not the body I had left the building with two months ago. The body I was in now was the body that had been working on a problem for eight weeks and was still in the later stages of that work.

Walking was available. Running was not….

I walked.

Slowly. Maya at my left side, close enough that the warmth of her was present without her holding my arm, which I had indicated I didn’t need and which she had accepted, which was one of the thousand small ways she had been understanding the difference between what I said I needed and what I actually needed across the time we had known each other.

Olive was outside too…

And my father.

Standing at the edge of the group

Not integrated…. present.

I caught his eye.

He looked at me

Something in the look.

Not the certainty he usually carried in everything. Something underneath the certainty…. the thing that had been underneath it in the hospital room when he had put his hand on my shoulder and said you look like hell.

I nodded and smiled….

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He nodded.

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We would have the other conversation later. The full one. The one about Maya, and the investigation, and the things I had heard from inside the dark that I was going to need to tell him clearly, in language that left no room for the interpretation he had been applying since she first appeared in my life.

Later….

Today was the air.

I stepped through the hospital’s main entrance and felt it

The cold.

I stopped.

Let it land

Maya looked at me.

I looked at the sky.

“Two months,” I said.

“Two months,” she confirmed

I slipped my hand into hers.

She leaned her head against my shoulder….

Not carefully…. the way you rested against something when you had confirmed it would hold.

“I owe you two months,” I said. Looking at her stomach, which was more present than it had been in any photograph I had seen across the weeks. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it up to both of

you.”

She looked up at me…..

“You being here,” she said, “is enough.”

The reporters arrived before the sentence had finished settling

Not a crowd…. Three of them. Four. A fifth from the left side, moving faster than the others with a camera already raised.

I moved.

The instinct arriving before the analysis of it… my body shifting, my arm going around Maya….

Security… Marcus, who had been ten feet away…. was already moving, already creating the physical barrier between us and the advancing group.

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“Miss Maya….”

11

“….your father’s death…..”

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“…..now being investigated…..”

“…..do you know who killed him…..?”

The voices overlapping in the way of people who had a limited window and were trying to get their questions into it before the window closed

I looked at Maya’s face.

Held it for a second…. the assessment, the automatic read I had been doing since the moment I understood what she was and who she was and how much of herself she had been carrying without adequate support.

She was composed

Not unaffected…. composed. The distinction she made between the two things, which she had articulated to me once in a different context and which I had filed as one of the truest things I had heard

her say.

“Did your father uncover corruption….”

‘…. right before he died?”

I stepped forward.

Not aggressive….. “My fiancée is not taking questions today,” I said. My voice the professional register. The flat, clear delivery of information rather than confrontation. “We ask that you give us space.”

Marcus and his team were managing the physical containment

The reporters did not disappear…. they retreated to the margin where containment held them, voices still going but at a distance that gave us room to move.

I turned….

Maya looked at me

“The investigation is public,” she said, quietly. For me rather than the cameras.

“I know,” I said.

“They’re going to keep asking….”

“Let them ask Reeves,” I said. “That’s what investigators are for.”

Maya pause

“Let’s go home,” I said.

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We moved toward the car.

Marcus flanking us. My mother with her hand on my father’s arm, the two of them falling in behind with the cohesion of people who had been in this together for two months and had found, in the crisis, the version of their partnership that worked better than the version that had been operating before it.

I did not look back at the reporters….

I did not look for the cameras.

I looked at the car, and the door, and Maya getting in carefully, and the movement of a world that had continued without me and was now simply including me again.

In the crowd…. in the permeable edge where reporters and onlookers blurred, a phone raised.

A photograph taken….

The moment captured: Maya and Alex, the hospital entrance behind them, his hand at the small of her back, her profile composed and watchful

The phone lowered.

The person who had raised it turned.

Moved away through the crowd with the unhurried purpose of someone who had gotten what they came for.

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