Page 111 of The Fire Line

That worked. Jay’s attention shifted toward defending his conversational habits instead of examining Harris too closely.

Good.

Harris settled farther into the couch and made himself look unaffected.

“So why’d you split up?”

Jay gave him a long look. “That is an impressively abrupt change of subject.”

“Thought we were talking about Miles.”

“We were talking about one very specific aspect of Miles.”

“Still Miles.”

Jay shook his head, but he answered.

“We wanted different lives by the end. I wanted to keep traveling for work. Miles wanted something more settled. Then we spent about a year pretending that was a scheduling problem instead of a fundamental incompatibility.”

For the second time in less than a minute, Harris had to make sure his face did nothing.

Different lives.

One person built for leaving. One built somewhere permanent.

The resemblance was close enough that Harris wished he hadn’t asked.

Jay would finish the film and go back to New York. Harris would stay here. They had known that before anything started, and Harris had told himself the ending was part of what made starting possible. No promises meant nothing to break. No attempt to turn temporary into permanent meant nobody wasting a year trying to solve with plane tickets what was really a problem of two lives built in different places.

By the sound of it, Jay had already learned that lesson once.

Harris had no intention of asking him to learn it again.

He nodded as though the answer had landed nowhere particularly important. “Makes sense.”

Jay looked down at his bottle. “Eventually.”

“You still talk?”

“Yeah. We’re still good friends.”

That surprised Harris enough that he looked over.

Jay caught it. “What?”

“Nothin’.”

“You have a very expressive nothing.”

Harris ignored that. “Wasn’t ugly, then.”

“The breakup?” Jay shook his head. “Sad for a while. Not ugly. We still liked each other. We just didn’t work anymore.”

Harris understood that better than Jay could know.

Claire had taught him that loving someone and being able to build the right life together were not necessarily the same thing.

“Good,” he said.