He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 218

Chapter 218

Alex’s POV

I had been to Paris twelve times…. All of them for work.

This was different before we left the ground. Maya spent the first hour of the flight at the window.

Not because she had never flown… she had. But there was something about the attitude and angle of a private aircraft that was different from the passenger experience, the way things looked when you were close enough to the window to see without the visual compression of a commercial cabin.

She looked at the clouds the way she had looked at the coast from the balloon….

I watched her looking.

“You keep staring at me,” she said, without turning from the window.

“I lost two months,” I said. “I’m trying to catch up.”

She turned

Looked at me.

The expression that existed when she was genuinely amused and was not going to perform the amusement.

“You already have,” she said.

She reached across and squeezed my hand.

We talked the way people talked on long journeys when there was nowhere to be and nothing urgently required.

Not about the investigation.

Not about the company or Reeves or the box in the lighthouse or the name in my father’s letter that was now in the appropriate hands.

About other things.

Her childhood…. the detailed version that appeared when someone was comfortable enough to tell you the stories they usually summarised.

Her father coming home with a kind of chocolate that had been discontinued and which she had never found again and thought about whenever she saw the same shade of brown on anything. A school teacher who had told her she argued too much, which she had received as a criticism at the time and had been revising upward ever since.

We traded stories.

The cabin was quiet except for us.

The world was above the clouds.

Somewhere over the channel, she fell asleep

She slept with her head tilted slightly toward the window.

Her hand still near mine on the table.

I didn’t move

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Chapar 218

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Sat beside her and looked at the clouds and thought about the morning I had woken up in a hospital bed with her face being the first thing I found and about every morning since and about the durable quality of something that had survived everything that had been thrown at it and was still here.

Still here….

Beside me.

Carrying our child.

Wearing two rings now.

The thought produced something I didn’t have an adequate word for.

Gratitude was close. But gratitude implied I had been given something, and what had happened was different from being given something…. it was the product of a long, sustained effort by two people who had each been doing the work on their side without knowing, for a significant portion of the time, that the other person was doing the same.

You didn’t receive that.

You arrived at it….

She woke as we began the descent

“How long?” she said.

“Two hours,” I said.

She looked at the window….

The clouds below us now instead of beside us, and through them, beginning to resolve, the geography of a city approached from the air.

She leaned forward….. The city appeared.

Maya made a sound.

Not a word.

The sound that existed before words when something arrived and the body responded before language was ready.

“Paris,” she said

“Paris,” I confirmed.

She turned.

At me….

“Welcome to the City of Love,” I said.

She was still smiling when the aircraft stopped moving

Still smiling when the crew prepared the door.

The smile that had started at the tower and had not found a reason to stop

I looked at her from across the cabin and made the private promise that existed in a person’s chest rather than in

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Chapter 215

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their words, that didn’t require an audience and didn’t require articulation.

I would spend the rest of my life protecting that smile.

I would spend the rest of my life being the person who added to the smile rather than to the things that worked against it.

The door opened.

The Paris air.

Cold….. different from the coastal cold we had been in…. denser, more inhabited, carrying the weight of millions of people living their lives in close proximity

I stood.

Extended my hand.

“Ready?”

She took it.

At the bottom of the steps, on the tarmac, standing where people had been waiting and who were very glad to see what was coming down the steps….

Catherine.

And Olive.

And, at a slight distance that communicated he had come and was not entirely certain of his welcome, Richard.

Maya stopped on the last step

Looked at the assembled faces.

At Catherine, who was already moving toward her…….

“We couldn’t let you celebrate alone,” Catherine said, reaching for her. “It took exactly one phone call.”

Maya looked at me.

“You knew,” she said.

“It took exactly one phone call,” I confirmed.

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