He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 82

Chapter 82

Mason’s POV

The bed still held the warmth of Selena….

I lay back against it and looked at the ceiling and thought about her expression in the moment before she walked out in the middle of our spicy moment…… the lie arriving in her voice with the smoothness of something practised

Work.

The word of someone who had a prepared answer ready before the question was asked.

Selina did not have unprepared answers.

Which meant she had been preparing for this call

Which meant she had known it might come.

I ran it back

The evening had been good… genuinely good, the specific rare quality of time that existed outside the machinery of everything else.

We had talked about Maya with the comfortable shorthand of two people who shared a project, and it had been easy, and then it had been something else, and then it had been exactly what I had needed it to be.

And then the phone….

And the expression that arrived on her face before she managed it away.

Not alarm…. something more specific.

The expression of someone encountering information they had been half-expecting and had not fully decided how to handle.

She knew something

She had known it before tonight.

She had not told me.

The Selina I knew told me everything that was relevant to our shared position. We had an understanding… information was currency and currency was shared between partners who needed it equally.

She had never, in a long time ever withheld something significant, even when she was with Maya.

Or she had never been caught withholding something significant.

I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose….

Thought about the message she had received from her own phone two weeks ago….. the one that had frozen her expression while I was holding our son and laughing. The one she had called work then too, before putting it face down on the cushion.

Two works in two weeks…

The same expression both times.

1/4

+25 Bonus

The crying started at eleven-forty.

Not the gradual kind… the immediate, full-commitment kind that communicated a specific and urgent grievance with the world. I was off the sofa before I had consciously decided to move, across the room and into the nursery with the specific speed of a man who had discovered, in three weeks of fatherhood, that the crying stopped faster when addressed immediately.

He was on his back, arms and legs conducting a vigorous protest against whatever had ended his sleep, face flushed with the specific indignation of someone whose needs were not being met with sufficient urgency.

I picked him up.

He did not immediately stop

“I know,” I said. “I’m here”

He continued registering his objection.

“I am literally holding you,” I said.

He considered this information and adjusted to a lower volume, not because he was satisfied but because the closeness had shifted something in his calculation.

I walked the length of the room and back…

This was the thing nobody had told me about, the walking. The specific, repetitive, surprisingly physical requirement of a small person who needed motion to settle. I had walked more in three weeks than I typically walked in a month. My son, apparently, had strong opinions about momentum.

I walked

He considered.

By the third circuit he had subsided to the occasional, aggrieved sound of someone who had made their point and was allowing the situation to resolve.

I looked at his face in the dim light.

The jaw…

His mother’s focus in the eyes when they were open. The specific, imperious quality of a person who had arrived with their personality fully formed and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

The frustration of the evening… Selina’s exit, the lie, the withheld information, existed somewhere below the immediate reality of this.

I walked another circuit.

He made a small sound that was approximately seventy percent complaint and thirty percent something else.

“You’re fine,” I said. “Everything is fine.”

He seemed unconvinced but was willing to table the objection temporarily.

By midnight he was settled….

I laid him down with the careful, specific movements of someone who had learned that the transition from held to horizontal was a variable with significant consequences if handled incorrectly. He stayed settled. His breathing

2.4

+25 Bonus

evened.

I stood at the edge of the crib and looked at him for a moment.

The company

The plan….

Zara Collins and Patterson and the pieces moving through the city toward the outcomes I had designed. Maya Hargrove and her eighty percent and her fiancé and the pregnancy she had denied.

All of it existed….

All of it was in motion.

And here, in a dim room at midnight, was this….. a small person sleeping with the absolute, uncalculated trust of someone who had decided the world was safe because the person holding them had said so.

I was not accustomed to being trusted unconditionally.

I was not accustomed to the weight of it

I went back to the sitting room.

Selina’s phone was on the table.

She had taken her personal phone… the one with the concerning messages, but her second phone, the one I had not known she had until this moment, was lying face up on the side table beside her empty glass.

Not deliberately left.

Forgotten in the urgency of leaving.

I looked at it…

Then I looked at the door she had walked through.

The phone lit up.

An incoming call.

Unknown number…

I stared at it.

The call rang four times and went to voicemail.

Thirty seconds later: another message notification. Same unknown number.

I had two choices.

The first was to leave the phone where it was and address this with Selina directly when she returned… the choice

of a man who trusted his partner and operated with transparency and expected the same in return.

The second was to understand what I was dealing with before that conversation.

I looked at the phone….

Thought about two works in two weeks. The frozen expression. The urgency of the exit.

3/4

I thought about the thing I had been choosing not to examine….

Selina was hiding something.

Not from the world. From me

The phone lit up again.

I reached for it.

P

Comments

Support

Share