He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 53

Chapter 53

Selina’s POV

The baby was asleep.

That was the only reason I had taken the call in the bedroom rather than stepping outside – I needed to hear him breathing in the bassinet while I managed this, needed the specific anchor of him while everything else threatened to come apart.

“Explain it to me again,” I said, keeping my voice low and level. “From the beginning.”

The man on the other end of the line began.

I listened for approximately forty-five seconds before I stopped listening and started simply managing the sound of his voice, the way you manage something unpleasant that has to be endured before it can be dealt with. The excuses had a specific texture: the target had moved, there had been an additional party, the situation had changed on the ground.

The situation had changed.

Maya Hargrove was still alive and running a company and wearing a ring and sitting in boardrooms, and the situation had changed.

“Stop,” I said

He stopped

“You had a location,” I said. “You had a plan. You had a confirmed window.” I kept my voice below the level that would carry through the door

“What you did not do was succeed. I don’t require an explanation for the gap between those two things. I require it to not happen again”

“Ms. Reeves, the security around her has significantly….”

“I am not interested in her security,” I said. “I am interested in results. If you cannot produce results then I will find someone who can and you will have a different kind of problem” I paused. “Am I being clear?”

A pause

“Yes,” he said.

“Don’t contact me on this number again. I’ll reach out when I have further instructions”

I ended the call.

Stood in the centre of the bedroom

The baby’s breathing, small and steady and entirely unknowing…. was the only sound.

I pressed both hands flat against my sternum and breathedi In. Out.

The technique the hospital counsellor had suggested in the weeks after the birth, for managing the specific combination of postpartum anxiety and the particular pressures of my current circumstances, which the hospital counsellor had not been made fully aware of.

Maya was still standing…

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She was not just standing, she was standing in my building, at the head of a table that had been Mason’s, running a company that had been supposed to be gone from her reach permanently.

She had appeared on every financial channel in the country announcing herself as though the past eight weeks had been a deliberate strategy rather than a lucky series of contingencies

And Mason

Mason had gone to lunch with her…

He had told me it was tactical.

Reconnaissance

The gracious loser performing the performance

I had nodded and said the right things and then spent the afternoon running through every version of what a lunch between Mason and Maya could produce and arriving, each time, at versions I found uncomfortable

He had loved her once…

Or something like love, the functional version that men like Mason produced, which was less about feeling and more about possession. He had possessed Maya for eight years and discarded her and was now, apparently, finding reasons to sit across from her in restaurants

I told myself it was the ten percent…

I told myself it was strategy

I was good at telling myself things

The knock came at two-fifteen.

I heard it from the bedroom…. three short raps on the suite door, the kind that tried to sound casual and wasn’t.

I looked at the baby

Still asleep

Crossed to the door.

Opened it.

And felt the blood leave my face

He looked exactly the same

That was always the thing about him, the specific, unsettling consistency of a man who seemed untouched by the passage of time or consequence.

Mid-forties. Well-dressed in the way that communicated money without communicating legitimacy…

Eyes that held the particular quality of someone who had decided a long time ago that other people’s comfort was not his concern.

I stepped outside immediately, pulling the door behind me

“What are you doing here?” My voice came out lower than I intended, stripped of everything except the urgency.

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“I came to see you,” he said…

Simply. As though this were reasonable

“You cannot be here.” I moved further from the door, putting distance between us and any possibility of Mason returning and finding me in this corridor with this man

“You have no reason to be at this address. We agreed…..”

“Arrangements change,” he said. Still calm. The specific calm of someone who found other people’s panic mildly interesting.

“Mason could come back at any moment.”, I kept my voice to a whisper but the force behind it was not a whisper. If he sees you here…. if he sees us together….”

“Then perhaps,” he said, “you should have thought of that before you started making calls you couldn’t finish.”

I looked at him.

“I’ll come to you,” I said. “Tomorrow. I’ll contact you through the usual channel and we’ll meet somewhere….”

“I’m not interested in tomorrow,” he said.

“Then make yourself interested.” I held his gaze with everything I had. “Because right now, in this corridor, you are standing between me and everything I have spent three years building, and I need you to walk away”

He studied me for a long moment.

The way he studied things… not with hostility, with calculation. The assessment of a man determining whether the asset in front of him was still worth the investment.

Then he turned.

Walked toward the elevator with the unhurried pace of someone who had decided to go not because I had asked him to but because he had chosen to.

I stayed at the door until the elevator closed behind him

Then I let out the breath I had been holding since I opened the door..

Back in the bedroom.

The baby still sleeping. Mason’s side of the room still undisturbed

No evidence of anything…

I stood at the window and looked at the harbor, the same view that Mason stood at when he was managing something, which I had always found telling…. and I thought about what had just happened.

He should not have come here.

He had never come here before.

Our arrangement had always operated through intermediaries, through channels that maintained the necessary distance between his world and mine.

His appearance at this address meant something had changed in his calculation….that whatever he was managing had reached a point where maintaining distance was no longer the priority.

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Chapter 51

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That was not a comfortable thing to understand.

I thought about Maya in that boardroom. The recording she had somehow obtained. The two years of planning I had not seen coming from a woman I had known for fifteen years and apparently never fully understood

I thought about the man in the elevator.

About the intersection of all of it

I was playing a very complex game on too many fronts with too many players who were smarter than I had

accounted for, and the baby was sleeping in the bassinet and Mason was at lunch with his ex-wife and the man in the elevator.

I needed to think.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Unknown number.

I opened the message.

I’m not done with you yet. 1

I stared at the screen.

Four words.

No context.

I thought about Maya.

I put the phone face down on the nightstand.

Went to the bassinet.

Picked up my son.

1

Held him against my chest and felt the specific, uncomplicated weight of him, the one thing in my current life that existed without an agenda or strategy or the approaching sound of consequences….

He made the small sound he made when he was content.

I pressed my lips to his head

Someone was watching….

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