He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 268

Chapter 268

Maya’s POV

The first resignation landed on my desk at eight-fifteen on Monday morning.

By noon there were four.

The emergency hearing and the Alderton, Crane and Cross representation and had made the calculation that a company in this situation was not the place to anchor their professional future to.

I could not blame them

I also could not let the calculation spread.

I left my office at one…

Not for a meeting.

Not for a scheduled obligation.

I walked.

Engineering first.

The floor where the technical teams operated…. the people who did the structural work of the company, whose daily function was the function that made everything else possible.

I walked in.

Heads came up.

I did not call a meeting.

I sat down at an empty workstation.

“Tell me what you’re working on,” I said.

The engineer who answered was a man I recognised from the files but had not spoken to directly in months….

He told me.

Carefully at first.

Then, as I listened without interrupting, I asked questions.

Real questions…. not the performed curiosity of someone managing a walkthrough, but the specific, interested questions of someone who had grown up watching a man run a company and had absorbed, through that watching, a genuine interest in how things worked.

He answered….

The team around him, gradually, drew closer.

Four departments.

The accountants, who had concerns about the judicial approval requirement for major decisions and what it meant for the quarterly operations.

The receptionists, who had been fielding press calls for days and were exhausted and needed acknowledgment that the exhaustion was real and that they were doing the right thing by maintaining the standard they maintained.

+15 Bonus

The factory supervisors…. the ones who oversaw the production operations, who had worked with Edwin Hargrove through the building years and who carried, in their faces and their posture, the specific quality of people for whom this company was not a professional affiliation but something older and more structural.

The security team, who had their own concerns…. operational concerns about the situation that no one had thought to address because no one had thought to ask.

I sat with all of them.

I listened to all of them.

I did not promise resolutions I could not deliver

I promised what I could deliver: that I knew they were there, that I understood what the company meant to them, that I was not going to make decisions that treated them as incidental to the outcome.

The auditorium at four-thirty.

Marcus had arranged the technical side… the microphone, the screen, the logistics of assembling several hundred people into one space at short notice.

I stood at the front….

Looked at the faces.

The engineers, the accountants, the supervisors, the receptionists, the security team, the executive assistants, the legal support, the IT department…. every person who had been in this building when my father ran it or who had come after and had built their

own investment in what it was.

The fear was visible.

Not uniformly…. some people were composed, others less so, the specific variation of a workforce that had received the same news and was processing it differently.

But underneath the variation, the same thing.

“I won’t promise that the coming weeks will be easy,” I said.

I did not perform steadiness.

I did not need to

“There’s an ownership dispute being decided by a court in forty-eight hours. The other side has significant resources.

The process is going to require things from all of us that will be demanding.” I looked at the faces. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you the outcome is certain, because I respect you enough to not say things I can’t guarantee.”

The room was quiet…

“What I will tell you,” I said, “is that the claim being made is built on a forged document. On paper that didn’t exist when my father was alive, bearing a signature he never made.” I paused.

“Someone has been trying to take this company for nine years. First through the death of the man who built it. Then through the systematic dismantling of everything he left behind.” I looked at the faces….. at the engineers, at the supervisors who had known Edwin, at the receptionists who had not. “They have not succeeded. Not because of me, because of what this company is. Because of what the people in this room have kept it being.”

A silence.

“As long as I am standing here,” I said, “I will fight for every person in this building and for every dream my father poured into it. That is not a conditional promise. That is what I am doing.”

Chapter 268

The first clap was from the back left.

Then another.

The auditorium.

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