He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 242

Chapter 242

Brenda’s POV

The commute to Voss Maritime took eleven minutes.

I had timed it on the first day and had found the eleven-minute version of the route… not the fastest, which required a connection, but the most consistent, the one that absorbed minor delays without compromising the arrival time.

Eleven minutes…

Long enough to run through what the day required.

The work itself, which was real…. the reports, the meetings, the contribution expected from someone in the position I had been hired to fill. Mason had built the résumé carefully but he had not needed to build competence. I had the competence.

I had been working in this sector for eight years before any of this had started, before the approach had been made, before the envelope had arrived in a café with a man who had a particular kind of cold about him.

Competence, I had.

The other part of the role was the one that required something different….

The early days at Voss Maritime had been about visibility through usefulness.

Not dramatic visibility…

The result, across ten working days, had been exactly what a person who was genuinely competent and genuinely committed produced: a reputation for being good at their job.

Alex had thanked me personally.

Twice

The first time in a meeting… a direct acknowledgment….. The second after hours, when he had seen the light under the door and had stopped.

You don’t need to stay this late, he had said.

I wanted to finish it, I had said. I don’t like leaving things half-done.

He had looked at me.

The look that communicated he was assessing whether the thing he had just heard was true.

It was true

That was the part I had not expected… that the things I was doing to build this cover were things I would have been doing anyway.

That was a complication I was not discussing with Mason

The coffee with Maya was the third.

The first two had been shorter…. the initial one, after the maternity boutique, which had been thirty minutes and had produced a conversation about the practical difficulties of a pregnancy with twins from someone who had

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clearly been reading extensively about exactly this.

The second had been an hour.

The third was two hours, in the coffee shop near the boutique that had become the default location, the one with the corner table that accommodated a pregnancy without making it the primary fact of how someone sat at a table.

She talked about the twins.

The way they moved differently from each other…. The boy, she thought, was more insistent. The girl, she thought, arrived more quietly and then stayed.

She talked about Alex.

Not in the way of someone performing happiness… in the way of someone who had found something that was actual and was still, weeks later, slightly surprised by how actual it was. The way he checked in during the day. The restaurant booking, which he had apparently made from a hospital bed as a promise and had fulfilled in Paris and which she described Intentionally….

She talked about the investigation.

Briefly but carefully.

I listened.

I asked the right questions.

The questions that were interested rather than extractive…. the ones that produced more conversation rather than more information, because information arrived naturally inside conversation and conversation was what she was there for.

She had not checked the card since the third week.

I had noticed.

I called Mason from my apartment at nine

The debrief call.

“Everything is going according to plan,” I said.

“And?”

“They trust me.”

The silence that followed….

“Good,” he said finally. “Stay exactly where you are.”

The call ended.

I set the phone on the table.

Looked at myself in the window…. the reflection of the apartment behind me, my face superimposed over the city

below.

I had been thinking about the calculation for two weeks.

Not Mason’s calculation…. mine.

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The calculation that had begun as a simple one: accept the envelope, do the job, receive what the envelope had communicated was available on the other side of it. It had seemed simple. It had required doing things I was able to do…. building professional relationships, being genuinely kind, listening carefully

What I had not accounted for was that doing those things with real people produced real results.

Maya was not a target who happened to be human.

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