He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 302

Chapter 302

Maya’s POV

Documents covered the dining table by the time Alex found me.

Not the digital archive…. the physical records had pulled from the old office box weeks ago and had never fully finished sorting, the accumulated paper trail of my father’s business across decades that I kept returning to whenever a question surfaced that only the original source material could answer.

I heard Alex stop in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” he said.

I didn’t look up.

“Working,” I said.

He crossed the room, the deliberate quiet of someone approaching a conversation he already knew would be difficult.

He looked at the papers.

“Maya,” he said. “You promised me you were going to rest.”

“I said I would try,” I said.

“That’s not the same thing….”

I heard the edge building in his voice, the particular frustration I recognized from weeks of watching him navigate my refusal to

slow down.

He sighed.

“You’re carrying twins,” he said. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

I looked up finally….

“And what am I supposed to do,” I said. “Sit around while the people who killed my father are still out there?”

“You don’t even know if these documents will lead to them,” he said.

“Then I’ll keep looking until they do,” I said.

The finality in my own voice surprised me even as I heard it, the particular certainty of someone who had stopped negotiating with herself weeks ago and had simply accepted that stopping was not currently an option she was willing to consider.

“You’re putting too much pressure on yourself,” he said.

I pushed the papers away, the sudden movement betraying more frustration than I intended to show.

“Because someone has to care about what happened to him,” I said

“I care,” Alex said.

His voice had softened, but the words landed wrong anyway, arriving into a space already too raw to receive them gently.

“Then help me,” I said. “Instead of telling me to stop….”

We argued for several minutes after that.

The disagreement that kept returning to the same core disagreement no matter which direction either of us tried to steer it – his fear for my health, my refusal to abandon the investigation, both of us understanding, somewhere beneath the frustration,

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that neither position was entirely unreasonable and neither of us was going to yield.

Eventually Alex stepped back

“I need some air,” he said.

He left without waiting for a response.

I sat alone at the table for several minutes after the door closed behind him…

I looked back at the papers.

Returned to the work, because returning to the work was the only thing that currently made the exhaustion feel purposeful rather than simply draining

The records in front of me covered a stretch of years from early in my father’s career….. supplier agreements, partnership discussions, the mundane texture of a company building itself through countless small decisions that rarely mattered individually but accumulated, over time, into something significant

I had been cross-referencing company names against the account structures Fielding’s team had traced, looking for overlap, for pattern, for anything that might connect the ordinary business of my father’s early years to the considerably darker architecture that had eventually cost him his life.

A name caught my attention.

I checked it against an earlier page.

The same company….

I pulled a blank sheet toward me and started writing names down as I found them….

Three names repeated across multiple documents spanning several years.

Then a fourth.

None of them appeared, on the surface, to be connected. Different industries. Different registered addresses. Different signatories on the paperwork I had in front of me.

But something tied them together.

I couldn’t yet say what.

ALEX’S POV

I returned home just after a couple of hours, the key sticking in the lock the way it always did when the weather turned damp. The house smelled of coffee gone cold and paper… Maya’s paper. I found her exactly where I’d left her…. cross-legged, surrounded by photocopied police reports, sticky notes, and the yellow legal pad she filled with questions no one else seemed willing to ask.

She didn’t look up when the door clicked shut….

“You’re still at it,” I said.

Her pen kept moving.

The doorbell cut her off.

I waited a beat, expecting her to rise, but she only frowned at the page, lost in the ink. I went downstairs.

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