He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 212

Chapter 212

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Chapter 212

Maya’s POV

The bookstore was the kind that existed in coastal towns with enough history in them…. not the curated aesthetic of a shop that had decided to be charming, but the accumulated charm of somewhere that had simply been there, with the same owner of a succession of them, long enough to develop its own gravity.

Books arranged in a way that made sense to someone who wasn’t us

I had been looking at a shelf of local histories…. the kind that documented coastlines and their buildings and the slow stories of communities that didn’t make national headlines…… when Alex disappeared.

He was gone for seven minutes.

He returned without explanation.

We had lunch at the small table near the bookstore window, which had the view of the road and the water beyond it, and he put a package on the table while I was reading the menu.

“Open it,” he said.

Leather.

Dark green, the shade that existed between forest and bottle. Bound properly, not the mass-produced kind…. the individual kind, made with enough attention to communicate that the object was intended to last.

A ribbon.

I untied it.

The first page.

In Alex’s handwriting…. the title:

Letters to Our Baby.

I looked up at him….

“I thought we could write to them,” he said. “One letter each. Maybe more, over time…. whenever something happens that they should know about eventually. And then when they’re old enough to read it, they’ll know.” He held my gaze.

“How much they were loved before they were here. How much they were wanted. How much was happening around them that they couldn’t know about yet but that was all for them, in the end.”

I looked at the journal….

At the first page.

At the pen he set beside it without making a production of it.

I wrote slowly.

Not because I didn’t know what to say…. because I wanted to say it correctly, which was different from saying it quickly. The words that deserved to last deserved to be chosen carefully.

I found out about you in March, I wrote. A morning I was not expecting. A test I had bought without admitting to

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myself why I had bought it.

I sat on the floor of the bathroom for twenty minutes

Not from sadness….. You were real before I was ready for you to be real. Which is, I think, exactly how it should be.

I wrote about the weeks after…. the fear and the caution and the daily awareness of a person becoming alongside everything else that was happening. The way I had spoken to you through the dark, not knowing if you could hear

The way having you had given me something to organise the fighting around, a reason that wasn’t about me or the company or the investigation but was simply and completely about you.

You gave me a reason to keep going I wrote, on the days when keeping going required more than I had available 1 want you to know that. Not as a weight to carry, as a gift you gave me without knowing.

I set the pen down.

Alex took the journal….

Read what I had written.

Took the pen.

He wrote his… When he finished, he passed it back.

I read.

I missed your first months.

Not because I chose to. Because a bullet found the wrong direction and your mother was where it was going and I was faster than it

I don’t say that so you will think me brave. I say it so you understand that she was always worth the fastest thing available. She has been the person I have been moving toward, in one way or another, for ten years. When the moment came, the body knew before I did.

I missed your first months and I will not miss the rest

I have been told your heartbeat sounds like mine. I don’t know how that’s possible or how your mother knows but she was right about everything else so I have no reason to doubt her about this.

Whatever else I am, I will be your father every day that I am given. That is not a promise I am making to you…. it is simply a fact about what I intend. You don’t need to earn it. You already have it.

I stopped reading….

Pressed my hand flat on the page.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

Alex looked at the city through the window

I looked at the journal.

“This will become our family’s greatest treasure,” he said.

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“Yes,” I said

I closed the journal carefully.

Set it on the table between us….

The ribbon still there, the bookstore’s specific smell still in the air, the city still doing its ordinary thing through.

the window.

The baby, somewhere in the space between the journal and the present moment, becoming

We walked back to the cottage at the pace of people who had nowhere to be immediately and were choosing to take that at its full value.

The lane.

The cottage gate.

I saw it before Alex did….

The flowers were on the step.

Not from the resort…. I knew what resort arrangements looked like…. This was different. The same arrangement as the hospital room… white, structural, the kind that required real skill and had a signature quality to it.

The same as before.

No card.

I stopped walking.

Alex stopped beside me

Looked at the flowers.

Then at me.

We were four hours from the city….

We had told no one where we were staying except Marcus and Reeves.

The resort staff.

We had told the resort staff our names when we checked in….

“The unknown caller,” I said.

Alex looked at the flowers.

The same white arrangement that had arrived at the hospital

The same anonymous…… but we had not told anyone about.

“They knew where we were,” Alex said.

Not as a question….

We stood in the lane and looked at the flowers and thought about the symbol above the locker and the symbol on the lighthouse cliff and a trail that had been distributed across multiple locations by a man who had trusted

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certain people with specific pieces.

Someone had followed the trail longer than we had.

Someone had known where the trail was going

And now they were here.

D

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