He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 214

Chapter 214

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Chapter 214

Maya’s POV

The lighthouse had been in my mind since the balloon…..

I lay beside Alex in the early light and thought about the trail and the key and the box that Reeves now had and what additional materials might be waiting in a lighthouse on a cliff four hours from the city, and I thought about all of this….

Alex’s hand was on mine. He had been awake for a while.

I could tell from his breathing, “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“Do you.”

“The lighthouse,” he said.

I looked at the ceiling.

“I wasn’t…”

“Maya”

“I was thinking about it a little,” I said.

He turned his head.

I turned mine

We looked at each other in the early light of the last full day.

“You want to go there immediately,” he said.

“Not immediately,” I said. “Soon.”

“Today”

“Possibly this morning,” I said. “If we left now we could be there by…..”

He laughed.

“Come on,” he said.

The beach at this hour.

Alex had his hand in mine.

We walked.

I tried not to think about the lighthouse.

I thought about the lighthouse

“I can’t help it,” I said. “It feels important. Everything about it feels like the next step…. the same symbol, the same distribution system he was building, the same patient architecture of someone who understood he wasn’t going to be there to finish it and built it so that the finishing could happen without him.”

Alex stopped walking.

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Chapter 214

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Turned to face me

“It probably is important,” he said. “I’m not asking you to dismiss it.” He held my gaze….

“I’m asking you to give it tomorrow. One more day.” He looked at the beach ahead of us. “You’ve been running from one emergency to the next for months. The lighthouse has been on that cliff for however long that lighthouse has been on that cliff. It will be there tomorrow.”

I looked at him….

At the face that had been listening for two months.

“One day,” I said.

“One day,” he said.

“And we go first thing tomorrow….”

“First thing tomorrow,” he agreed

He led me further down the shore.

Past the beach, past the section of coast where the town’s infrastructure ended and the shore became simply itself…

We stopped at a stretch… No one in either direction.

Just us.

He found the first shell…. A good one… the kind that had kept its form, he held it up. “For the collection,” he said.

I looked at him.

“We don’t have a collection,” I said.

“We’re starting one,” he said.

He put it in my hand

I don’t know how long we were on that beach.

Long enough for the pile of shells to grow beyond what could reasonably be described as a collection and into something that communicated either genuine interest or a very pleasant way of spending an afternoon that was not thinking about lighthouses.

The sandcastle had been his idea….. Not mine, I was not generally a person who built sandcastles, had not been since the age at which sand castles were a natural activity, and would not have suggested it. But Alex said he wanted to build something for the baby to know about eventually, something that had existed even before they were fully here, and the logic of it was sufficiently unusual that I could not find a way to argue against it.

We built a sandcastle.

It was not a good sandcastle.

The walls collapsed twice before they held. The towers were lopsided. The moat that Alex insisted on digging filled with water exactly once before the walls absorbed it.

We laughed every time the waves came up and took a piece.

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The sun had started its early descent… the kind of sunset that happened at four-thirty, which always felt slightly wrong but had its own beauty – when Alex spread the blanket.

I had forgotten about the lighthouse.

Not completely….. it was still there, in the background of my attention, the way important things stayed in the background even when you were choosing to attend to other things. But background. Present but not driving.

I sat.

Alex sat behind me.

His arms around me, his hands at my waist, his chin at my shoulder.

The three of us watching the sun make its descent into the horizon.

“The lighthouse isn’t going anywhere,” he said.

“I know,” I said

“Tomorrow we chase answers,” he said. “Today I wanted to watch the sunset with my wife.”

The word landed.

Wife.

The thing we almost were.

The thing we were going to finish being as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

I leaned back against him.

“Tomorrow,” I said

“Tomorrow,” he said.

U

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Chapter 15

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