He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 224

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Chapter 224

Alex’s POV

The phone calls had not been business calls.

Maya knew this…. I had made twelve calls in four hours.

The florist. The garden venue the hotel had recommended. The lantern supplier, which had taken three calls because the first contact did not have the quantity required and the second had the quantity but the

wrong size and the third had both and was willing to deliver in the window available.

She saw it from the garden gate.

We had taken the route I had arranged…. through the hotel courtyard, through the gate, down the stone path that existed on the property’s map as a secondary access to the upper garden and on no other map

I had found.

The gate opened.

She stopped

The lanterns were in the trees….. Not lit yet, the evening was still early, the light not yet dark enough for them to produce their full effect.

But the arrangement of them was visible, the deliberate placement of something that had been hung with attention, each one at an interval that communicated care rather than quantity.

The table below them.

Long for two people…..

Blue and pink.

The flowers at the table’s centre…. not alternating, not separated, mixed in the way of two things that existed alongside each other and were more themselves for the proximity.

“You did all this today?” she said.

“I had a little extra motivation,” I said.

She looked at me

At the garden.

At the lanterns, still unlit, waiting.

“Alex,” she said.

“Come and sit down,” I said.

Dinner

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The food had been arranged through the hotel kitchen…. the kind of arrangement that communicated trust and was repaid with the care of people who understood what the dinner was for and had decided

the care was part of the service.

We talked about parenthood…..

Not the logistics of it… The kind of parents we hoped to be.

The kind of people we hoped they would become…. not from our ambitions for them but from whoever they turned out to be, individual people who were already themselves, already different from each other, already becoming.

A boy and a girl

We debated names the way people debated things when the stakes were real but the decision was not yet required…. with genuine engagement and without urgency, the most enjoyable kind of argument.

She had positions

I had positions.

The positions were incompatible.

We were both very pleased about this.

Dessert arrived….

I stood.

Maya looked up.

I raised the glass.

“To my wife,” I said.

She went still.

“Who has already made me the happiest man alive.” I held her gaze across the table. “To my son, who will always know what courage looks like because he will have you as his mother.” I paused. “And to my daughter, who will grow up knowing exactly how a woman deserves to be loved…. because she will have you as her example.”

The garden was quiet except for the evening sounds of Paris beyond the walls.

Maya pressed the back of her hand against her eyes

“I don’t deserve you,” she said.

“No I said “I don’t deserve you I sat. “I’m just grateful life gave me another chance to prove how much I love you’

She looked at me

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The expression that had no professional version.

The one underneath everything else

“You said son,” she said.

“I did,” I said.

“And daughter,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“They’re real,” she said. “Both of them”

“Both of them,” I said.

She looked at the garden.

At the flowers.

At the lanterns, which the staff had begun to light during dinner, moving quietly through the garden with the unobtrusive efficiency of people who understood that what was happening at the table was more

important than their presence.

The lanterns, lit.

Floating….

The impossible beauty of a lit lantern….. the way it contained light without being light itself, the way the warmth of it moved against the dark of the evening sky.

We stood at the garden’s edge.

Watching them rise….

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