Page 104 of The Fire Line

Jay stopped.

Harris kept his eyes on the pasture. Correcting himself felt more exposing than the original sentence had.

“You can stay. If you want, I mean.”

Jay returned to the rail. This time, his sleeve touched Harris’s along the wood.

After a while, Jay nodded toward Rain. “Did Nell come out here with her?”

“Sometimes. She used to find me here before Rain was born.”

“When you were hiding?”

“Wasn’t hiding.”

“Of course not.”

Harris rubbed his thumb across a crack in the top rail, the wood polished around it by years of hands. “When we were kids, she’d come out and talk until I told her whatever was wrong.”

“Effective strategy.”

“Annoying strategy.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive.”

Harris glanced at him. Jay’s expression remained solemn enough that Harris could not accuse him of smiling.

“She always know where to find you?” Jay asked.

“Usually.”

Memories came easily out here. Nell perched on the upper rail because she knew it made him nervous. Nell stealing his gloves and denying it while wearing them. Nell sitting beside him after Walt announced some new plan for their lives, shoulder pressed against his as though the two of them had already agreed on a different one.

“She answered questions for me,” Harris said. “When we were little.”

“Because you wouldn’t?”

“Because she figured she knew what I was gonna say.”

“Did she?”

“Yup.”

Jay looked across the pasture. “That must have been maddening.”

“Drove our parents crazy.”

Nell never mistook silence for refusal. She would sit until the answer came, without turning her patience into something Harris owed her for later.

Claire had learned parts of it. Evan understood more than Harris gave him credit for. Della usually pushed through both silence and refusal until he answered.

Nell had simply known.

The field notebook returned with painful clarity.

ASK HARRIS. HE KNOWS.

As if there had never been a version of the world in which Harris was not there to answer her.