He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 243

Chapter 243

Maya’s POV

The prenatal appointment had taken longer than expected.

I texted Brenda from the waiting room.

Running fifteen minutes late. Still on for lunch?

Her reply was immediate.

Already at the table. Take your time

The restaurant was the quiet one.

Brenda was at the corner table.

She had ordered water and was reading something on her phone…

She looked up when I came through the door.

The smile.

“You look wonderful,” she said. “The appointment went well?”

“Both fine,” I said. “Both exactly where they should be.”

She pressed her hands together.

“Good,” she said. “Come and sit down.”

Two hours

The food arrived….

She talked about her childhood.

The stories that communicated texture rather than summary, that arrived with names and seasons,

I talked about mine.

I talked about my father.

Not the investigation…. the other version. The man. The chocolate that had been discontinued. The shoulders I had ridden on. The person you loved before you understood that loving was what you were doing.

She listened with keen attention.

She asked the questions that communicated genuine interest rather than data collection… the questions that produced more of the story rather than more of the information.

I noticed, somewhere in the second hour, that I had stopped monitoring the conversation for the signs I had been monitoring it for in the first weeks.

The checking had stopped.

Naturally, without my deciding it

She said the thing about glowing.

1/4

+15 Brnus

“You’ve been glowing lately”

I laughed.

“I think that’s Alex’s fault,” I said. “He refuses to let me do anything on my own.”

“He’s protective?”

“Almost too protective,” I said. The smile arriving without managing it. “Sometimes I think he’d lock me in the house if I’d let him.”

She laughed….

The conversation moved.

She asked about work….

I told her the version that was available.

I mentioned Alex’s work without thinking.

The way I mentioned things that had become structural… part of the architecture of the day, present because they were present rather than because I had decided to include them.

“He keeps everything locked,” I said. “Files, records, anything significant. He trusts the systems but he doesn’t trust uncontrolled access.” I said

“Sometimes I tell him he’s the only person who actually remembers every detail.”

She raised an eyebrow.

The playful version.

“He sounds like a perfectionist,” she said

“He definitely is,” I said. “It’s one of the things I love about him”

The bill arrived.

We split it.

She was the kind of person who didn’t let you pay for things, which was a quality I had noted early and which had communicated something… someone who understood that financial reciprocity was part of how trust was built.

Both could be true.

I let it be both.

We gathered our things.

“I’m really glad we met,” I said.

And I meant it.

She returned the embrace….

“So am I,” she said.

Against my shoulder.

2/4

I stepped back.

Looked at her.

At her expression

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

“You too,” I said

I drove.

The route home.

Thought about the lunch.

About the glowing comment, which had been light and genuine.

+15 Benus

*ZARA’S POV✶

The glass wall had been one of the office’s selling points when I had first seen the space.

Transparency, the agent had said.

I had a different relationship with it now.

The meeting ended at twelve-forty.

Alex came through the corridor door with the expression he wore at the end of productive meetings…..

The next thing was waiting at the end of the corridor.

Maya

I had not known she was coming.

She was not on the schedule.

She had simply appeared, as she apparently sometimes did…. arrived without announcement, without the advance organisation that two people with full and complex professional lives usually required, because the relationship between Alex and Maya had somewhere along the way stopped needing that level of organisation.

She was there.

He saw her

The smile.

It had always existed for her.

It had been there, waiting, for ten years, and she had walked back into his life and it had simply resumed.

The smile.

Directed at a woman carrying twins at the end of a corridor on a Tuesday afternoon, carrying what appeared to be a bag from the restaurant around the corner that I understood he had been wanting to try since the renovation.

I turned away from the glass.

3/4

I understood this.

+15 Benus

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