He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 63

Chapter 63

Alex’s POV

The road was empty at this hour.

That was why I had taken it, the longer route home, the one that added twelve minutes and removed the city’s noise and gave the kind of space that a man needed when his thoughts were louder than everything else.

I had been driving for twenty minutes and had not yet found the space.

My hands were tight on the wheel

Maya’s voice…

I don’t need a husband. What I need is a father for my child.

I had heard it the way you hear things that land before you’ve prepared for them…. fully, without the buffer of anticipation, directly in the place where such things settled and stayed. I had nodded. I had said okay.

I had gone home and made dinner and behaved like a man who had received information calmly and was processing it with appropriate equanimity.

I was not processing it with appropriate equanimity.

I was driving a dark road at eight in the evening with my hands too tight on a steering wheel and the specific, grinding quality of a thought I had been refusing to examine pressing through every available gap

What if she still loves him?

I did not want to think about Mason.

I thought about Mason.

About the specific way she had looked when he appeared in her corridor.

Not frightened… composed.

The specific composure of someone who had history with a person and had built sufficient armor around it. Not the look of someone who had fully closed a door.

Or was that my reading of it? The interpretation of a man who was looking for reasons to explain a woman’s distance rather than accepting the explanation she had given him directly?

She had told me clearly.

She had said it in a room with no ambiguity and no room for misreading

What I need is a father for my child

She had meant it.

The problem was that she had also knocked on my door at midnight and said my name in a voice that had nothing to do with co-parenting arrangements.

She had also reached for my face across a restaurant table.

She had also kept the ring

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Your words and your actions don’t match, I had told her.

I had said it about her tendency to withdraw while everything she did communicated the opposite.

I had not said: I am frightened that your words are the performance and your actions are the truth and I am the one who has been misreading which is which.

I was saying it now

To myself. In a dark car on an empty road.

The thought expanded.

What if everything she is doing is control? What if it isn’t healing at all? What if she is managing me the way she managed Mason… tolerating, enduring, making the best of a situation she found herself in rather than one she chose?

What if the night she had knocked on my door had been loneliness rather than love?

What if the yes on the bedroom floor had been fear rather than certainty?

What if I had spent ten years building toward something that was, from her side, simply the next available structure after the previous one collapsed?

The road blurred.

Not physically…. the specific, internal blurring of a man whose focus had gone somewhere it had no business going while operating heavy machinery.

The horn was sudden and loud and close

My hands reacted before my mind did…

The wheel hard right, the tires finding the edge of the lane and then the gravel at the road’s margin, the deceleration that happened when you took your foot off the accelerator and let physics do the work your brain was too slow to direct.

The car scraped to a stop on the verge with the engine still running and the headlights pointing at a ditch and the sound of the other vehicle’s horn fading as it continued down the road.

Silence.

Then my own breathing, which was considerably less controlled than I preferred.

I sat with my hands still on the wheel and looked at the ditch six inches from my front bumper and thought about how quickly things ended and how little the reason for the ending mattered once it had happened.

I thought about Maya

About a child who was not yet born and a scan scheduled for tomorrow morning and the specific, irreversible reality that this story had people in it who needed me to be present and functional.

I sat there for longer than necessary

Then I breathed out slowly.

Moved the car back onto the road.

Pulled over properly, engine idling, hazards on.

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Put my head back against the seat.

My phone buzzed….

The reflex to reach for it, the trained, professional response to a buzzing phone…. arrived before the more sensible instinct that said you are sitting on the side of a road after a near-collision and perhaps this is not the moment.

I reached for it.

Unknown number

I looked at it for a moment

Opened it

Two messages, sent seconds apart.

Did you miss me?

And then:

I’m coming back for you. This time I’m not leaving without you…

I sat very still.

Read them again.

The phrasing. The specific register of it, not threatening, not casual. The tone of someone who believed the question had an answer they already knew, and who was announcing a return rather than requesting one.

Someone who had been gone

Someone who believed they had a claim.

My jaw tightened….

I ran the possibilities. The number was unknown… not stored, not recognisable. The message contained no name, no context, no specific reference that confirmed identity.

It could be a wrong number. It could be someone in my professional network communicating through an unregistered line.

It could be several other things.

I had been in a business that operated at high levels for long enough to understand that messages arriving without names at moments of personal and professional vulnerability were not usually coincidences.

They were timed. They were designed to arrive when the recipient was already off-balance and therefore more susceptible to what the message was trying to produce

Fear. Confusion. Distraction.

I looked at the road ahead.

The city lights visible in the distance. The dark stretch of road between here and there.

I was thinking about forwarding it to Marcus when I looked in the rearview mirror

A car.

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Parked perhaps two hundred metres behind me on the empty road, engine off, headlights dark.

It had not been there when I pulled over.

I sat forward slightly…

Watched it in the mirror with the focused attention of someone who had spent weeks operating in a situation where surveillance was not a paranoid concern but a documented reality

No movement

No lights coming on.

Just a car, sitting on a dark road, on a stretch where there was no reason to stop unless you had stopped specifically because something ahead of you had.

I picked up my phone.

Called Marcus

He picked up on the second ring.

“I need a plate check,” I said, keeping my voice level. “Dark sedan, parked approximately two hundred metres behind me on the Northfield Road. No visible plates from this distance…. I need a camera pull from this stretch

within the last ten minutes.” 1

“On it,” he said, without asking why. “Are you safe?”

“For now.” I watched the mirror. “Also… a message came in on my personal line from an unknown number. I’m forwarding it. Trace priority.”

“Understood. Stay on the road until I have something”

I put the phone down.

Kept my eyes on the mirror

The car in the mirror remained still.

I thought about the messages.

Did you miss me?

Someone from before. Someone who believed their departure was temporary

I thought about the timing, arriving minutes after a near-collision, on an empty road, with a car parked behind me in the dark.

None of it was coincidence

All of it was coordinated.

The question was whether it was coordinated by Mason, by whoever had left the dead bird in Maya’s office, by the same person who had filmed her through her office window, or by something else entirely, a thread I hadn’t identified yet, running parallel to the threads I had been tracking.

I looked at the rearview mirror one more time.

The car was still there.

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Chaptered

Still dark….

Still waiting.

I put the car in gear.

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