He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 61

Chapter 61

Mason’s POV

The office door opening, the particular quality of footsteps that belonged to a man who moved through spaces with full awareness of them…. not rushed, not hesitant, the specific cadence of someone who had somewhere to be and the resources to get there without adjusting for anyone else.

Alex Voss…

We came face to face in the corridor outside Maya’s office.

He stopped

I stopped…

The corridor was empty in the specific way corridors go empty when two people occupy them with enough combined weight that the surrounding space reorganises around them. The floor beyond us continued its end-of- day business.

Here, between his position and mine, the air had a different quality…

He looked at me

I looked at him.

Not long….. three seconds, perhaps four. Long enough for both of us to complete the assessment and reach the same conclusion: that this corridor, at this hour, with whatever had just happened inside that office, was not the right place for the conversation that existed between us.

He moved first

Not because I had won the silence, he had decided the scene wasn’t worth creating, which was its own kind of information about how he calculated things. He walked toward the elevator with the unhurried pace of a man who

had made a choice and was comfortable with it.

I watched him go

The elevator doors opened. He stepped in. The doors closed.

I turned toward Maya’s office

Her denial had been immediate.

Too immediate, and too controlled, and delivered in the specific register of someone who had the answer ready before the question finished. I had spent enough years watching Maya manage rooms to know the difference between honest reaction and prepared response.

That had been prepared response….

Which meant the word I had heard through the corridor, the one that had arrived with its own weight and had been restructuring my thinking ever since, was accurate.

She was pregnant….

I walked back toward the elevator, past Lila’s empty desk, past the communications suite, and out of the building into the evening. In the car I made the call….

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Patterson picked up on the second ring.

“I need two things,” I said. “The first: medical records. Maya Hargrove. Specifically anything from the past three months… any appointments, any consultations, anything that confirms or denies a current pregnancy.” I kept my voice level. “I understand the sensitivity of the request. Find a channel.”

“That’s a significant ask,” he said.

“I’m a significant client,” I said. “Find a channel that doesn’t come back to me. The information only.”

A pause. “I’ll see what’s accessible. Medical records are protected but there are adjacent sources… pharmacy records, specialist referrals, insurance pre-authorisation requests. Not always complete but often confirmatory.”

“That’s sufficient…”

“And the second thing?”

“Voss,” I said. “Whatever you found that didn’t add up…. I want it accelerated. Full priority. Alongside the Singapore thread.” I looked out the window at the city. “Whatever is in his past that he wouldn’t want placed in front of a woman with Maya’s history, I want it on my desk within the week.”

Another pause

Longer this time

“The Voss situation is developing,” Patterson said carefully. “The Singapore thread has additional layers I didn’t anticipate when we last spoke…. The woman who filed the complaint, I’ve located a reference to her in a separate filing from eighteen months ago.

A civil matter, unrelated to Voss Maritime on the surface.”

“On the surface,” I said.

“Below the surface,” he said, “there’s a connection to a holding structure that appears in Voss Maritime’s filing history under a subsidiary name. A subsidiary that was dissolved three years ago.” He paused. “The dissolution was clean. But the timing and the parties involved….”

“Say it plainly,” I said.

“Alex Voss may have had a relationship with this woman that went beyond professional,” Patterson said. “And the dissolution of the subsidiary may have been part of the resolution of that situation rather than a straightforward business decision.” He paused again. “I need two more days to confirm. But if it holds…”

“If it holds,” I said, “then Maya Hargrove is engaged to a man who settled a situation involving a woman by making her and the corporate structure she was connected to disappear simultaneously.”

The city moved past the window.

“That’s a possible interpretation,” Patterson said carefully. ‘I’m not in a position to confirm it yet”

“Two days,” I said.

“Two days,” he confirmed.

I hung up…

Sat back in the seat.

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Looked at the harbor as we crossed the bridge – flat and grey in the evening light, the same view from every angle, the same indifferent water.

Maya was pregnant….

Not with my child.

The realisation had been arriving in stages since the corridor, and I had been letting it arrive without examining it too closely because the examination produced things I didn’t have a prepared response for. Not grief, I was past the architecture of grief where Maya was concerned, or I had told myself I was.

Not the corporate calculation either, though that lived alongside everything else

Something older than both of those.

The specific, involuntary response of a man confronting the concrete evidence that the woman he had discarded had built an entire life in the space he had left

Not just a company. Not just a shareholder position.

A family…

With Alex Voss.

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