Page 115 of The Fire Line

Their eyes held a beat too long.

“Adjacent?” Jay asked.

Harris’s mouth shifted. “Might save some walking.”

There it was.

“Professionally relevant.”

“Pure logistics.”

Jay gathered the pages before his face betrayed him completely. “Talk to your family. Think about it.”

“All right.”

“The film matters,” Jay said. He waited until Harris looked at him again. “But so do you. Those are separate things.”

Harris held his gaze for another beat before nodding, and Jay had the sense that this, more than anything else he had said, was the part Harris intended to think about.

* * *

The amendment sat open on Harris’s kitchen table that night, its pages marked with Jay’s handwriting and the notes Harris had added during dinner.

The conversation with his family had gone about as expected. Evan liked the money. Elise wanted to know what the increased filming would mean for the girls and the guest schedule, while Della had cared most about Nell’s archive and kept Jay pinned to the subject until she understood exactly what family review would mean.

Since the conversation about Miles, Walt had remained civil with Jay, but some of the ease had gone out of it. Harris had noticed how little his father volunteered unless the film gave him a practical reason.

Then Walt had reached the compensation figure.

You know the place better’n anybody.

Harris had told him that wasn’t the question.

What’s the question?

Whether I want to do it.

That had quieted the table. Hell, it had surprised Harris a little too. He wasn’t accustomed to treating what he wanted as useful evidence in a ranch decision.

Walt’s answer had been predictable. You can handle it.

As though ability settled want.

Della had corrected him before Harris needed to. Handling something isn’t the same as wanting it. Elise agreed, and Evan said Harris could turn the whole thing down if that was what he wanted.

Walt had never actually said otherwise. He rarely needed to. His father could arrange the ranch’s needs, Harris’s competence, and the available money until saying no began to look less like a choice and more like an indulgence. Harris recognized the trick because he had spent most of his life helping perform it on himself.

So he had brought the amendment back to the cabin unsigned.

The money mattered; there was no honest way around that. It would cover most of the north-pasture fencing and replace the pump Walt intended to repair until it qualified as an archaeological site. It would give Evan some breathing room through winter and help keep the seasonal hands employed when the guest business slowed. Harris could name a dozen uses for it without getting out of his chair.

Nell mattered too.

Her name was still there on the original proposal beneath the amendment. She had wanted the documentary, and she had wanted Jay to make it. Harris had ignored the films she sent him while she was alive, then watched them after she died and discovered, too late to tell her so, that she had been right about the man behind the camera.

Not entirely right, probably.

Harris doubted even Nell had predicted this particular complication.