He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 235

Chapter 235

Zara’s POV

The work was not difficult.

That was the first thing I discovered about Mason’s instruction to be present, to be dependable, to be available when things were hard. The actual work…. the emails, the project organisation, the meeting attendance… was not difficult.

I was competent.

I had always been competent.

What I had not anticipated was what the competence would produce.

Not gratitude… I received that, consistently, from Alex and from the team. Not access… I had that, in the functional sense, the professional proximity that came from showing up and being useful.

What I had not anticipated was what I would see while being useful.

Alex returned to Voss Maritime the week after the ceremony…

I was there for most of them.

I attended the meetings he ran with the efficiency of someone who had been running things from inside a coma… by which I mean he had been receiving updates from Maya’s voice for months and had arrived back at his desk knowing more about the current state of things than anyone expected.

He thanked me for holding things together

He meant it.

He asked my opinion in meetings.

He received the opinion with genuine consideration of someone who was actually interested in the answer rather than performing interest.

He never raised his voice

He never made me feel like the work I was doing was less than it was.

He was, in the professional sense, exactly the person I remembered him being. And that was the problem.

That was the thing I had been building toward, across four years and a return to this city and weeks of arrangement and a recording on my phone and a handshake in a lobby….and the problem was not any of it.

The problem was what happened when Maya called.

The first time I saw it, I was in the middle of explaining something.

A meeting report… the numbers from a pending client review, the information that the team needed before the call with the client at the end of the week. Alex was listening with a focused attention he brought to all information that required accurate retention.

His phone vibrated…

1/3

+15 Benus

He looked at the screen.

His face changed.

Not dramatically…. He smiled.

He excused himself. Stepped to the window.

“Hi,” he said.

One word. I continued with the meeting report.

I did not look at the window.

Three more times across the week… The pattern was the same.

Phone. Screen. The face. The step to wherever the call would be slightly more private. The conversation I could not hear in full…. The twins being discussed.

I could tell from the smile that appeared at certain moments… the one that I now understood was the smile of a man thinking about two people who did not yet exist in the form they would take and who already had more of his attention than anything else.

I had told myself, for four years, that the obstacle was Maya.

This was the story I had been living inside… the story of a man who had been available, who had spent four years in proximity to me, who had eventually given me what proximity produced. And then Maya had come back and had been between us and I had come to this city to remove the between.

I sat.

And understood.

The obstacle had never been Maya

The obstacle was that Alex had only ever loved one woman.

What he had with Maya was something that had existed for ten years without being acted on. That had survived a broken marriage, scandals, a coma.

The kind that didn’t require proximity.

The kind that existed without asking to.

I had spent years chasing something that had never existed in the form I was chasing it.

Not Alex… Alex had been real. But the version of Alex I had been chasing, the one who would eventually look at me the way he looked at Maya and smiled….

That has never been possible – that version required him to not be who he was.

And he was exactly who he was.

My phone rang.

Mason.

“Phase Two begins tomorrow,” he said.

2/3

15 Behus

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