Page 121 of The Fire Line

It could have been criticism or gratitude. With Walt, it was frequently both.

The phone returned to Evan. “You two finished establishing which one of you runs the ranch?”

“Nope.”

“That’s what I thought. Have a nice night.”

The call ended.

Even nearly three hours from home, Harris had still been consulted on every decision, while Walt retained the right to make each answer official. The arrangement was inefficient, familiar, and unlikely to change merely because Harris had somewhere else he wanted to be.

Jay put his phone away. “You need to go back?”

“Nope.”

“Everything okay?”

“For now.”

Jay nodded without arguing or disguising disappointment as concern. If Harris said they had to leave, Jay would get into the truck. The certainty quieted something in him.

“Dinner?” Jay asked.

“Yup.”

“Thank God. I’m starving.”

* * *

They drove to a steakhouse near the hotel, the kind of place Harris had been in a hundred times before: dark wood, laminated menus, framed photographs of cattle nobody working there had ever met. It was busy enough that no one paid attention to them.

Harris liked that more than he expected.

No cameras. No Priya. No Evan walking through. Nobody noticing where Jay looked or how long Harris looked back.

They took a booth near the rear. Jay ordered a burger and a beer; Harris ordered steak. For the first few minutes, they talked about the meetings because Jay still had questions.

“So, the access-road argument,” Jay said. “That was actually about liability.”

“Mostly.”

“But they kept calling it maintenance jurisdiction.”

“Nobody wants to say liability.”

Jay pointed at him with his beer. “Exactly.”

Harris stared.

“What?”

“You really were listening.”

“That’s generally how meetings work.”

“Not the ones I go to.”

Jay laughed, and the conversation drifted toward county roads, water rights, and which families owned what land. He had filmed in enough rural places to understand that geography was rarely only geography, and Harris found himself explaining things he would not have bothered explaining to someone who treated the country as scenery.