He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 231

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Chapter 231

Maya’s POV

I had not expected him to be on one knee.

Not because a proposal was beyond the range of what Alex had been capable of this week…. it had been a week of extraordinary things and I had learned, with increasing evidence, not to set a ceiling on what he might arrange. But because he had already proposed. He had done it on a bedroom floor at midnight with shaking hands and a ring, and I had said yes, and the ring was on my finger.

I had not expected him to ask again…

I turned because I had been looking at the arch and the people assembled beneath it and had felt him move behind

me….

He was on one knee.

The small velvet box in his hand.

Open.

I did not manage to do anything with my face.

The tears arrived before he had said a word…. They carried the weight of everything that had tried to prevent them.

“When we first got married,” he said, “we carried too much pain and too many secrets.”

His voice was low but firm

“We loved each other,” he said. “But we never truly had the chance to celebrate that love the way we deserved.”

I pressed my hand to my mouth.

The ring in the box…. I could see it from where I stood, but I was not looking at it. I was looking at his face…

“I almost lost my life, Maya.”

He said it plainly.

Not for the emotional impact of it… because it was true, and he was telling the truth, and this was the moment he had chosen to say it in the context in which it belonged.

“Waking up beside you made me understand that every day with you is something I will not waste again. Not a single one.”

The garden was completely still….

I could hear Catherine… the sound of her trying not to make a sound, which was its own kind of sound.

Alex looked up at me again……

“So today,” he said. “Surrounded by the people we love. I want to ask you the question I should have asked the first time, with a full heart and without everything else in the room.”

The smile….

Through the tears that he was also crying, because he was, because he was not managing any of this.

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“Maya,” he said. “Will you marry me again?”

I was already nodding before the question finished

Not from reflex…….

“Yes,” I said.

My voice came out smaller than I had intended.

I said it again.

“Yes.” This time with the full weight of it, the word carrying everything I was capable of putting into a single syllable.

Then something happened that I had not planned and could not have planned.

I laughed….

The real one…. arriving through the tears, the two things existing in the same moment, which was the honest register of something that was both more than you could hold and exactly right simultaneously.

“Of course I’ll marry you again,” I said.

The garden erupted

Not dramatically…

Catherine’s particular sound, which had stopped being the sound of someone trying not to make a sound. Olive saying something I couldn’t hear.

Alex stood.

Slipped the ring onto my finger.

The new ring, beside the one from the bedroom floor.

Two rings.

Both his.

He pulled me into his arms with carefulness

I pressed my face against his shoulder.

Felt the garden around us….. the lights, the flowers, the people….

“You planned this from Paris,” I said. Against his shoulder.

“I planned this from the hospital,” he said.

I pulled back enough to look at him

“From the hospital?” I said.

“I had two months,” he said. “I was listening to everything. I heard you say that we deserved a real celebration with everyone who loved us, in a space that wasn’t a beach at night or a garden we were running through to a car.” He held my gaze. “You said it once, in the middle of something else. You didn’t know I was listening.”

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“I always thought you weren’t listening,” I said.

“I was always listening,” he said.

The priest was waiting at the arch.

Hand in hand.

The garden behind us, full of the people who had survived everything alongside us and were standing….

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