Page 116 of The Fire Line

Then again, knowing his sister, he wouldn’t have put much money on that.

He looked over Jay’s notes. Jay had argued about a gate and made jokes about Harris’s books, but he had pushed back on nothing that mattered. Not Nell. Not camera down. Not the cabin. Not the family.

Harris trusted him, and the truth had become inconveniently simple.

It wasn’t because they were sleeping together. Harris had trusted Jay before the first kiss—with Rain, with Della, with the yearlings, with all the small moments when Jay had understood that the person in front of his camera mattered more than whatever footage he might lose by lowering it. What had happened between them made that trust more dangerous. It didn’t make it false.

The harder question was whether Harris wanted to become the film’s central perspective at all.

He read the amendment again. More access meant letting strangers see the work he usually disappeared inside, the family history he rarely explained and parts of Nell that still felt as though they belonged only to the people who had loved her. He didn’t particularly like the thought of any of it.

But he could understand why it mattered.

Done badly, the film could flatten Shaw Ranch into something strangers understood too quickly: picturesque land, struggling family, dead daughter, changing West. Done well, it might preserve the contradictions instead. Harris trusted Jay to know the difference, which made it harder to dismiss the whole idea on principle.

His eyes moved farther down the page and stopped at the travel clause.

Follow-up travel.

New York.

That was the first part of the amendment that made him consider saying no.

Jay would leave when the shoot ended. Harris had known that before anything happened between them, and the ending had been part of what made beginning this feel possible. Five years with Miles had ended because Jay wanted a life that kept moving while Miles wanted something more settled. Harris had asked for that information himself; he had no intention of pretending he hadn’t understood the warning in it.

Jay would go home. Harris would stay here. Whatever they were now would almost certainly not survive the distance in its current form.

That was supposed to be the clean part. The shoot would end, Jay would leave, and distance would make the decision for them.

The amendment complicated that.

New York during post-production. Maybe a festival later. Another interview or a room full of producers or some other piece of work that could put them in the same place months after they had supposedly put this behind them.

If things ended badly, Harris might still have to get on a plane and spend two days working beside him.

If they ended well, whatever the hell that meant, seeing Jay again might only make the ending happen twice.

Neither possibility sounded particularly appealing.

Distance was supposed to do some of the work for him. The amendment left open the possibility that it wouldn’t.

Harris rubbed a hand over his jaw and looked again at the travel clause.

Agreed separately each time.

Good.

No promise that he would go. No assumption that Jay would ask him to. If New York became a problem, Harris could deal with it when it became one.

He didn’t need to solve it tonight.

Harris picked up the pen and looked once more over the pages. The ranch needed the money. Nell wanted the film made. Harris trusted Jay to finish it without turning his family into something easy.

Those were reasons enough.

The travel clause could become a problem later.

Harris signed.