All Chapters of He Came Back Running : Chapter 171 - Chapter 177

Mason's POV I moved through the rooms at odd hours. Not from restlessness exactly.... from the fact that sleep had become unreliable, arriving briefly and then releasing me back into whatever the night was doing, which was mostly being quiet and offering nothing to occupy the mind except the things I was trying not to occupy it with. The things always won. I had pulled the photographs out at eleven. Not deliberately.... I had been looking for something else in the storage cupboard off the study, something administrative that had needed to be found, and the box had been there at the back where I had put it years ago when the photographs had been demoted from display to storage for reasons I could no longer remember clearly. I had found what I was looking for and put the box back Then I had taken the box out again. The photographs were from the middle period. Not the early years of the marriage when everything had still been arranged. Not the later years when the perfor

Zara's POVThe security on Alex's floor was heavier than it had been.I had noticed this on my previous visit.... Someone had redesigned the access after the IV incident. Someone competent.I had been watching the floor pattern for two days.There was a window between the eleven-fifteen nursing handover and the eleven-forty security rotation where the specific corridor leading to Alex's room had a gap. Not a long one. Twelve minutes, perhaps fifteen.Enough...The room was exactly as I had last seen it from the corridor.Alex.I closed the door behind meStood for a moment with my back to it, looking at him.He looked better than heb had in the first days.... I crossed to the chair beside the bedSat down.I had told myself, in the car, that I was coming to see that he was all right. It was a plausible reason. A human reason.Sitting beside him now, in the quiet, with no Maya and no family and no medical staff requiring me to perform a register I had not brought

Zara's POVThe photographs arrived at two in the afternoon.Fourteen of them, sent through the secure channel I used for work I didn't want connected to my name. My contact had been thorough... I had received documentation from my private investigator, through a secured channel I believe was trustworthy....I set my laptop on the kitchen table, poured coffee I wouldn't drink, and opened the files.Maya and a manAnyone who did not know what the meeting was would not know what the meeting was.That was the first thing I understood, looking at the photographs.The second thing I understood was that this was the best opportunity I had been handed since I arrived in this city.I worked methodically.Not from excitement.... I had learned, across the years I had spent in professional environments that required precision, that excitement was the enemy of craft. Excitement made you move too fast. Excitement made you skip the verification step, the second look, the moment

Maya's POVThe apology had not been what I expected.I stood in the corridor with the two words still sitting in the air between us.... I'm sorry, and watched Selina's face do something complicated...Something shifted behind her eyes.I had spent enough years reading Selina's face across dinner tables and hospital waiting rooms and company functions to recognise the shift.... the moment when something that had been held in check found a crack and decided the crack was an opportunity rather than a warning."Sorry," she said.The word came back out of her mouth with a different weight than it had carried going in.... no longer an apology, something closer to disgust, as though the act of saying it had reminded her of everything underneath it that she had not yet said."Sorry doesn't fix anything," she said. "Does it. Sorry.... Sorry doesn't give me back Mason. Sorry doesn't bring back...." Her voice caught. Recovered into something harder. "You have no idea what I've lo