He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 289

Chapter 289

Mason’s POV

I went back the following day.

+15 Bonus

Not from the message…. the second warning, the same six words repeating themselves in the same cold register, had lost whatever power it once carried to influence my decisions. I had understood, standing in that dusty office two days ago, that whoever was sending these messages wanted exactly what I was doing

now.

I went back because I had not found everything.

The first visit had produced enough to unsettle me……

It had not produced enough to explain.

I worked through the remaining files systematically this time.

Not the frantic, half-organised searching of the first visit, when every discovery had arrived faster than I could properly absorb it. This time I catalogued as I went, separating documents by date, by category, by the specific relationships they revealed, building the picture piece by piece rather than letting it assault me

all at once.

Meeting records.

I found more of them than I had initially realised… not a handful of encounters between my father and Edwin Hargrove, but a sustained, ongoing relationship that spanned years before either of their companies had any documented professional overlap.

Business documents.

Agreements between entities that, on paper, had no reason to be connected, shell structures I recognised from the architecture I had spent years learning to build myself, the layered opacity of companies designed to obscure rather than reveal.

Payments.

Between organisations that had never, in any public record I had ever encountered, worked together.

The pattern was consistent.

My father and Edwin Hargrove had been connected in ways that predated everything I understood about their relationship, or lack of one. I had grown up believing they existed in overlapping but essentially separate business worlds… successful men who occasionally crossed paths at the same events, nothing

more.

This was something else entirely.

Sustained. Deliberate. The cooperation of two men who had built something together, over years as friends, quietly, without either family understanding the full extent of what was happening.

Somehow… Somewhere…. something had gone wrong between them.

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Something connected to Edwin Hargrove’s death.

I found the payment near the bottom of a folder I had overlooked on my first visit.

Routed through the same dormant holding company account.

I looked at the date.

This payment had been made shortly after my father’s reported death. My Father died three years after Edwin, Maya’s father’s death… I was already married to Maya….

Not years later, the way the earlier document had suggested.

Weeks.

Someone had authorised this.

Actively.

Deliberately.

Weeks after the funeral I had stood at, weeks after the closed casket, weeks after I had begun the long, careful process of inheriting everything my father built with the alliance of Maya’s late Dad and learning to live inside the specific absence of a man who had shaped every decision of my life.

I checked the date again.

“That can’t be possible,” I said.

The room offered nothing back.

I sat down in the same dusty chair I had occupied two days earlier, rubbed my face with both hands, and tried to organise the specific, competing explanations available to me.

Forgery.

Someone had been signing his name, processing his payments, maintaining an active presence under his identity for reasons connected to whatever architecture he and Edwin Hargrove had been building together before it collapsed.

Or had my dad not really died.

I had spent nine years believing something that the documents in front of me were actively contradicting, piece by piece, date by date, each new discovery closing off the comfortable explanations one at a time.

I kept searching.

Found another document.

This one dated further out… not weeks after his death, but years. The same signature. The same precise, unmistakable formation of letters I had watched him produce across my entire childhood, the originality and precision of handwriting that a forger could approximate but that I, having grown up watching the actual hand that produced it, would have recognised the moment it deviated even slightly from the genuine article.

+15 Bonus

It did not deviate.

It was his.

I stared at the document for a long time….

I thought about the funeral.

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