He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 67

Chapter 67

Maya’s POV

I was awake before the alarm.

The specific quality of the morning told me before I had fully surfaced, the light through the curtains wrong for the hour, my body already tense in the particular way it got when something had been running underneath sleep without resolution.

I lay still for a moment and let the day assemble itself around me..

The house was quiet.

The kind of quiet that confirmed, before I had looked or listened or done anything deliberate, that I was the only person in it.

Alex hadn’t come back.

I sat up…

Told myself immediately that this was fine. That it was expected. That I had asked for space and he was giving it to me and the fact that the house felt different at eight in the morning than it had felt two weeks ago was simply the natural consequence of a clearly communicated boundary being clearly respected

I got out of bed….

Moved through the morning routine with the controlled precision that had carried me through eight years of mornings that required more composure than I had naturally available.

Shower…

Clothes…

The specific, considered sequence of a woman who understood that the external version of herself was something she could always manage, regardless of what was happening in the register below it.

I stood at the mirror….

The cut above my eyebrow had healed to a faint line. The ring caught the morning light. My face looked like my face…. composed, specific, the face that had walked into a boardroom and taken a chair that had taken thirty years to build.

Something felt off.

Not in the mirror.

Underneath it.

I was ready by eight-forty….

Appointment at ten.

Plenty of time…..

No reason to rush, no reason to stand in the entrance hall with my coat on and my bag in my hand and my phone in the other hand doing the thing I was currently doing, which was standing in the entrance hall with my coat on and my bag in my hand and my phone in the other hand.

1/4

I looked at his name in my contacts

+25 Bonus

I thought about the text I had sent last night, the appointment details, simple and direct, and his reply: I’ll be there. But on one condition. And the coffee condition, which had made something in my chest do the thing it did when he was being himself.

That had been before the conversation in my office….

Before I don’t need a husband.

Before the nod that had absorbed more than I had meant to put in it.

I called him

It rang twice.

“Maya.” His voice was…. present. Alert.

The quality of someone who had been awake for a while and was answering a call they had been expecting and not expecting simultaneously.

“The appointment is at ten,” I said. “I wanted to confirm you were still planning to come.”

A pause…

Not long. Three seconds, perhaps. The pause of someone deciding something.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

“Okay.” I paused. “Good”

Another pause, on his end this time.

“Is that everything?” he asked.

No

“Yes,” I said. “That’s everything. I’ll send you the address”

“I have it,” he said

“Right.” I shifted my bag on my shoulder. “I’ll see you there.”

“See you there,” he said.

The call ended….

I held the phone for a moment.

Three words. I’ll be there. Delivered in the specific, contained register of a man who was honouring a commitment without embellishment, without warmth, without the undercurrent that had been present in every exchange between us for about six weeks.

I had done that

I had taken the warmth out of the register by asking for a distance I was discovering, at eight-forty-three in the morning in the entrance hall of a house that felt too quiet, that I did not actually want.

The feeling in my chest was not complicated….

2/4

+25 Bonus

I was reaching for the door when I saw it.

The file….

Still on the table by the window upstairs, I could see it from the entrance hall, positioned exactly where I had placed it last night when the unexpected message had arrived and pulled my attention sideways. I had not opened

I had stared at the message from the unknown number for a long time and then made the decision that whatever it contained, whatever the urgent claim about my father’s death, tonight was not the night to receive it. Not alone, not tired, not already operating at the far edge of my emotional capacity.

I had put the phone down

I had not slept well.

And I had come downstairs this morning and moved through my routine and almost left the house without opening the one thing my father had specifically held for me, had specifically asked a man to carry for thirty-one years, had specifically timed for this exact point in my life.

I went back upstairs

Stood at the table.

Looked at the file.

For Maya. When it’s time.

I picked it up

Held it

Thought about the message from last night: Your father trusted me with more than the file. There are things about Edwin’s death you need to know. A different number from Calloway’s. A different voice… or a different hand, since it had been a text.

Someone else who had been in my father’s orbit. Someone else who had been waiting.

How many people had he briefed?

How many rooms had he walked through, in the last months of his life, closing things off and setting things in motion, all of it pointed at a daughter who hadn’t known to look for it?

I pressed my hand against the file

The appointment was in seventy minutes

I put the file in my bag.

I would read it after.

After the scan.

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