He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 84

Chapter 84

Selina’s POV

The walk back took twelve minutes

I counted them.

Not because I needed to… because counting was something to do with the part of my mind that would otherwise run the calculations I had been trying not to run since I turned away from the alley and walked back into the city’s ordinary light.

Twelve minutes of breathing carefully…

Of looking like a woman walking home.

The apartment was quiet when I came in.

Mason wasn’t in the sitting room. The baby monitor on the side table showed the steady, green breathing indicator that meant everything was fine in the nursery.

I stood in the entrance hall for a moment and let the quiet settle around me

Then I sat on the sofa and thought.

The man’s name was Daniel Cole…

I had known him for two years… had used him, initially, for the category of arrangement that required someone outside Mason’s network.

Someone with specific skills and the professional discretion to apply them without asking questions that would require answers.

He had been useful

For approximately six weeks, somewhere in the most complicated period of the previous year…. when Mason was consumed by the trust situation, by Maya, by the governance crisis that had been building…. Daniel Cole had been something other than useful.

Something I had not planned.

Something that had happened in the specific way things happened when a person was under sustained pressure with insufficient outlets and someone convenient was present

Something that had ended.

Something that had, apparently, not ended for him in the same clean way it had ended for me.

He had come to me six weeks after the baby was born with the specific, quiet confidence of a man who had done arithmetic and found it resolved only one way.

He knew….

He had always known.

And now I was paying him.

I sat on the sofa and looked at the ceiling and thought about the darker version.

Not for long… I was not a person who permitted herself long engagement with thoughts that were impractical. But for long enough to run it to its conclusion and assess the conclusion honestly.

If Daniel Cole ceased to exist, the secret ceased to be leveraged.

No blackmailer.

No payments

No ongoing management of a situation that required, with every passing week, more attention and more resources and more careful compartmentalisation.

The child growing up without the complication of a biological father who was also a threat

Simple.

Clean.

Final.

I sat with it

And then I thought about the investigation….

The contractor situation from three weeks ago… the man who had been sent to Maya’s apartment, who had died before reaching the police station.

The inquiry was still running….

I was not named in it, and I would not be named in it, but I was not naive enough to believe that the complete absence of a thread between me and that situation was guaranteed.

Threads existed. The question was whether anyone was pulling them.

If they were pulling, and someone was, I could feel the specific quality of a situation that was being investigated even when the investigation wasn’t visible…. then another incident in my vicinity would not land in an empty field.

It would land in a pattern.

And patterns, once visible, became narratives….

I could not afford a narrative.

I pressed the thought flat

Pushed it back into the room it had come from and closed the door.

Not because I was above it

Because I was already above my limit on what I could manage simultaneously, and adding a third variable to the two I was already holding was not sustainable, and sustainable was the only thing I had left to aim for.

Stay quiet

Stay careful.

Keep the payments moving and the silence intact and the narrative holding until I found the exit on my own terms.

That was the plan

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I became aware, gradually, that something was wrong with the apartment.

Not obviously…. nothing overturned, nothing broken, nothing that announced itself with the clear language of a disturbance.

But a quality that I had been trained by years of careful living to notice…. the specific texture of a space that had been entered and exited, the way the air held the trace of someone who had been here.

I stood up….

Looked at the room.

The side table

The second phone

I crossed to it.

It was where I had left it… exactly where I had left it, in the specific position I had placed it before I went to meet Daniel Cole.

Except

I picked it up.

Held it.

The screen showed the lock screen, the standard display. Nothing apparently disturbed.

But the phone was warm….

Not the ambient warmth of a device sitting in a room… the warmth of a screen that had been lit recently. Within

the last hour.

I looked toward the nursery corridor….

Then toward the bedroom.

“Mason,” I said.

My voice came out steady.

No answer

I walked to the bedroom.

He was there….. lying on the bed with the specific, too-still quality of someone who was not asleep but was performing it.

His breathing was the controlled kind….

His hands were at his sides with the precise arrangement of a man who had decided where to put them.

He had been up

He had found the phone.

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I stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the man who believed he was the father of a child sleeping in the next room, and I thought about how much he had seen on that screen in the time he’d had it, and I thought about the specific, irrevocable quality of a secret once it had been half-seen.

Half-seen was the worst

Enough to build a question.

Not enough to resolve it….

I crossed to my side of the bed.

Lay down

Lay in the dark beside him and listened to him not sleep and thought about all the walls I had built and whether any of them were still standing.

“Long evening?” he said.

His voice was entirely level.

“Yes,” I said.

Silence….

“Get some rest,” he said.

I closed my eyes.

Neither of us slept.

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