He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 69

Chapter 69

Alex’s POV

The nurse was efficient and pleasant and I registered approximately forty percent of what she said

The other sixty percent of my attention was on Maya.

She had looked at me when I walked in with the specific expression of someone whose composure had developed a crack before she could seal it. The concern… real, unmanaged, arriving before the filter engaged… had been there for approximately four seconds before she had reassembled the professional version over it.

Four seconds.

I had been cataloguing Maya’s expressions for six weeks and I knew the difference between performed concern and the real kind. The real kind arrived fast and left traces.

The performed kind arrived considered and left nothing.

That had been the real kind

And then the nurse had sat beside me with her tray and her professional warmth that extended somewhat past professional, and I had watched Maya’s expression do something else entirely.

Arms crossed

Eyes down

The folder she had been not-reading with increasing intensity.

The jaw set in the specific way it set when she was managing something she did not intend to show.

I had looked across the waiting room and found her eyes and held them long enough for the message to transmit… whatever the message was, whichever version of it she was capable of receiving right now, and then I had asked the receptionist about the appointment timing because it was the cleanest available redirect and because I was not going to use her jealousy as leverage. 1

Even though every instinct I had was cataloguing it as information.

She was jealous

That was the fact I was sitting with while the nurse finished her work and Maya returned to her folder and the waiting room continued its ordinary business around us.

She had told me she didn’t need a husband. She had told me what she needed was a father for her child. She had delivered both statements with the specific, composed precision of someone who had practised them until they sounded like they originated from logic rather than fear.

And then a nurse had leaned toward me and Maya had crossed her arms and looked away and looked back and the folder had stopped making sense

I did not understand her.

That was the honest version, sitting in a hospital waiting room chair while a nurse cleaned scratches I had acquired by nearly driving into a ditch because I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman sitting across from me

I did not understand what she wanted from me…

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She wanted space.

She wanted presence.

She wanted me in the room but not too close

She wanted co-parenting and separate apartments and professional distance, and she also, apparently, wanted me to not have nurses cleaning my face with excessive warmth.

Those were not compatible requirements.

I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose.

The nurse finished

Stepped back

Said something pleasant.

Left.

I looked at Maya

She was reading the folder with renewed intensity, which told me she was not reading the folder at all.

I thought about the messages

The two that had arrived on the dark road after the near-miss, from the unknown number.

Did you miss me?

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

I had forwarded them to Marcus immediately and sat with the question of who had sent them for the past eighteen hours without arriving at a conclusion I was comfortable with.

There was one person it could be.

One person for whom those specific words… the register of them, the assumption of a continuing claim, the specific quality of someone who believed their departure had been temporary rather than final…. made sense.

Zara

I hoped I was wrong.

I genuinely, specifically hoped I was wrong, because Zara Collins entering this situation at this moment, with Mason already running strategies, with an explosion of public attention around Maya and Hargrove Meridian, with everything already operating at a level of complexity that required my full capacity…. was a complication I did not have the bandwidth to absorb cleanly.

Zara had not been simple when things were simple.

Zara in the middle of this would be something else entirely…..

I looked at the waiting room entrance

Across the chairs and the water dispenser and the reception window and the morning light coming through the high windows…

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I went still

At the far end of the hallway, partially obscured by the corner where the corridor turned toward the diagnostic wing, a woman was standing

Not waiting for something. Not moving between destinations. Standing with the specific, deliberate quality of someone who had positioned themselves to see without being fully visible.

Looking at me

I looked back.

She didn’t move

Didn’t look away.

And then, slowly, the way you do something when you want to make sure it has been registered… she smiled.

Every calculation I had been running stopped simultaneously.

The smile was the specific kind that belonged to someone who believed they had a relationship with the person they were directing it at. Not the neutral warmth of a stranger.

Something that assumed a shared history.

Something that assumed I would recognise it

My body was already shifting forward in the chair, the instinct to move toward the thing requiring assessment engaging before the conscious decision caught up.

She turned

Walked.

Not fast…. measured. The pace of someone who was going somewhere and expected to be followed.

I stood

“I’ll be back in a moment,” I said, to the general direction of Maya and the reception desk simultaneously, neither of which was an adequate explanation but both of which were going to have to suffice.

I moved through the waiting room, past the chairs and the water dispenser, into the corridor.

The woman was perhaps thirty metres ahead

Still the same measured pace.

Still not looking back.

I walked faster.

The corridor was busy in the way hospital corridors were busy…. purposeful movement in multiple directions, the ambient noise of a building doing the work it was built for. She moved through it without breaking stride, without the hesitation of someone unfamiliar with the space.

She knew where she was going

Or she was performing knowing.

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“Hey.” My voice carried enough to reach her.

She didn’t turn.

I closed the distance

Fifteen meters

Ten.

She turned a corner.

I reached the corner seven seconds later and came around it into the secondary corridor and reached out and caught her arm….

She spun immediately.

And every calculation I had assembled in the past ninety seconds came apart

Wrong face

The woman looking at me with startled eyes and a pulled-back arm was perhaps thirty-five, dark-haired, wearing the expression of someone who had just been grabbed by a stranger in a hospital corridor and was processing whether to be alarmed or angry.

“What are you doing?” she said, pulling her arm fully free. “Don’t grab me”

“I’m sorry.” I stepped back. “I thought you were… I apologise. I’m sorry.”

She looked at me for a moment… assessing, deciding and then moved past me with the wide berth of someone who had concluded the encounter and wanted distance from it.

I stood in the secondary corridor

Thought about the woman at the end of the hallway.

The smile…

The measured walk.

The deliberate turn at the corner.

If it hadn’t been this woman, and it hadn’t, clearly, definitively hadn’t…. then who had I seen?

And more urgently: had I seen someone who resembled someone, because I was already primed to see her everywhere?

Or had someone deliberately stood at the end of that corridor, at that angle, delivering that smile, and then sent a different woman around the corner to meet me?

The manipulation, if that was what it was, was precise

It required knowing where I was, what I looked like, what I was currently susceptible to.

It required resources and planning and a specific kind of knowledge

I turned back toward the waiting room.

Walking faster now.

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The chair where Maya had been sitting came into view as I rounded the final corner…

Empty.

The folder was gone. Her bag was gone.

The waiting area was full of people who were not Maya.

I stopped.

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