All Chapters of He Came Back Running : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Mason's POVThe 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 practisedWork.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 callWhich meant she had known it might come.I ran it backThe 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....An

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 requ

Maya's POVThe kitchen was quieter than the rest of the house...Catherine had been beside me for the past forty minutes, talking with the specific warmth of a woman who had been waiting for this conversation and was making the most of having it.She talked about the early months... the tiredness that arrived before you expected it, the specific, unexpected emotions, the things nobody mentioned until you were already in them. She talked about Alex's birth with the particular combination of fondness and theatrical suffering that mothers deployed when they had survived something and wanted credit for itI listened.I found, to my mild surprise, that I was not performing the listening...It had been a long time since someone had talked to me about something personal with the assumption that I deserved the information. Not as advice. Not as management. Simply as one woman sharing experience with another.I had forgotten

Alex's POVI stepped back.Not slowly... immediately, with the instinctive withdrawal of someone who has encountered something they hadn't prepared for and whose body had responded before the mind caught up.Zara's hand was still near my jawI looked at her.She lowered her hand"I'm sorry," she said."Zara.....""I know." She looked away. Toward the car, toward the harbour lights, toward anything that wasn't my face. "I know. That was..... " She stopped. Started again. "I came here telling myself it was for my own reasons. That I had my own clarity about it." A pause. "That wasn't fair to you"I looked at her....At the profile of a woman I had known for sixteen months and had left without adequate explanation and had not thought about with the frequency she had apparently been thinking about me.That was its own kind of guiltNot love. But guilt."You don't hav

Richard's POV The keys were in my pocket the entire time. I had known this when I said it... I think I left my keys... in the specific, unhurried voice of a man who had simply forgotten something and needed a moment to retrieve it. Catherine had waved me off without looking up from clearing the glasses. Alex was upstairs.... The house had absorbed the announcement without question. The door closed behind me. I breathed the cold night air. And took out my phone She answered on the second ring. "Richard." Her voice was the composed version.... the version she wore with the family, the one that communicated capability rather than need. Good. I had no use for the other version tonight. "I wanted to call before you got too far," I said. "The drive will give you time to think, and I wanted to make sure you were thinking correctly...." A pause. "I'm listening."