Page 113 of The Fire Line

Jay let him.

“You decide that?” Harris asked finally.

There it was. Jay heard the question beneath the question immediately: Did you decide that because of us?

“No.”

The guardedness that entered Harris’s face suggested the answer had not entirely solved the problem.

“We tested it,” Jay said. “Priya and I built two versions of the opening. One spread the perspective more evenly across the family. The other followed you and let everything else move outward from there. Eli watched both without knowing what we were testing.”

“Eli.”

“Yes. Our most sophisticated audience.”

“God help you.”

“He picked yours.”

Harris remained unconvinced, which was fair. Jay leaned against the tailgate beside him. He had rehearsed several professionally impeccable ways of explaining this and was apparently going to use none of them.

“I was seeing it before the mountain,” he said. “Before any of… this.”

That got Harris’s attention back.

“Wanting you made me question whether I could trust the instinct. It didn’t create it.”

Harris went still in the particular way Jay had learned meant something had landed. There were different versions of Harris’s silence now, distinctions Jay could not have made a month ago. This one wasn’t discomfort exactly. It was absorption.

“Whatever is happening between us doesn’t get to decide what the film needs,” Jay continued. “That’s why I didn’t rely on my judgment alone.”

Harris checked the yard automatically before answering, as though the word us might carry farther than ordinary sound. “Didn’t say you were.”

“You were thinking it.”

A pause. “Maybe.”

“Fair.” Jay opened the folder. “My point is, the film wanted you before I did.”

The words were already out before his brain caught up with them.

Harris heard them at exactly the same moment Jay did.

Jay closed his eyes briefly. “That was much worse out loud.”

When he opened them, Harris was grinning. Actually grinning.

“Probably won’t forget it.”

“Fantastic.”

Jay looked down at the paperwork before he could contribute anything else to Harris’s permanent collection of humiliating quotations. “The production wants to expand the agreement. More access to your day-to-day work, another formal interview, some additional archive material. Compensation goes up.”

He gave Harris the number and watched his eyebrows rise. “That much?”

“You’d be giving us a lot more.”

Harris looked toward the lodge, and Jay could practically see the money transform in his head into fencing, feed, payroll, machinery. Harris never seemed to encounter a dollar without immediately assigning it a ranch-related responsibility.