He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 66

world required vigilance.

I would give him everything.

Whatever it cost.

Selina’s phone vibrated.

She looked at it automatically, the reflex of someone who monitored communications as a professional habit and I watched her expression do something I had seen very rarely in the years I had known her.

It froze.

Not the managed stillness she deployed in boardrooms or when delivering difficult information. Something underneath that.

The specific, involuntary arrest of someone who has read a line that has rearranged a calculation they believed was settled.

“What is it?” I asked

She looked up.

Looked at me, then at the baby sleeping in my arms, then back at the phone.

“Nothing,” she said. “Work”

She put the phone face down on the cushion beside her.

Her expression had reassembled itself by the time she met my eyes again.

I looked at her for a moment

Then I looked back at my son.

She was lying.

I had known Selina long enough to know the specific quality of her nothing… and that one had been the kind of nothing that covered something significant.

I did not press.

There were things Selina kept in separate rooms, the same way I did. We had an understanding about those rooms that had served us both well.

But I noted it

Filed it

And held my son in the quiet apartment and thought about all the pieces moving in the dark, and whether I had accounted for all of them.

The ones I had placed…

And the ones I hadn’t.