Page 171 of The Fire Line

The county reopened the ranch road with restrictions the following morning.

Evan drove Harris ahead to meet the fire crews and insurance representative while Jay rode with Priya and Eli. The arrangement made perfect sense. Harris belonged in the first truck because the ranch and everything waiting at the other end of the road belonged to him.

Jay still watched Evan’s taillights whenever smoke or a bend made them disappear.

He caught himself doing it the third time and turned toward the window.

Damage appeared intermittently along the road: a blackened hillside behind an untouched house, fence wire suspended where every wooden post had burned away, pale dead trunks standing beside trees that remained improbably green. Eli’s camera stayed zipped inside its case at his feet. No one mentioned filming.

Familiarity made the damage worse once they reached Shaw land. Jay knew where the cottonwoods should gather near the lower bend and when the first barn roof ought to appear. Green pasture continued for several hundred yards before ending abruptly at a diagonal edge of wet ash.

The lodge stood, as did the private house, the main horse barn, and the cattle sheds farther south.

The north barn did not.

Its roof had folded inward over blackened beams, and beyond it the northwest pasture was reduced to mud, ash, and isolated fence posts.

Harris’s cabin was simply gone.

Only the stone chimney remained standing. The stove sat exposed beside it, warped by heat, and part of the metal bed frame showed through the debris where the bedroom had been.

Priya stopped beside the lodge. Jay got out slowly and waited for a brief wave of dizziness to settle.

Across the yard, Harris was standing beside Evan’s truck. His eyes found Jay almost immediately, moving over him in the quick assessment Jay had become familiar with over the last two days.

Upright. Awake. Breathing.

Jay’s attention answered before he could stop it, taking in Harris’s bandaged hand, the careful way he held his left side, the rise and fall of his chest.

Priya noticed.

Her gaze moved from Jay to Harris and back again, but whatever conclusion she reached seemed to satisfy her. She touched Jay briefly between the shoulder blades.

“Take it easy.”

“I am.”

She gave him a look that suggested his credibility had suffered recently, then followed Eli toward the lodge.

Across the yard, Evan had noticed too. He said something to Harris that Jay couldn’t hear, received a short answer, and glanced once in Jay’s direction before turning toward the north barn.

Nobody made anything of it. After what had happened on the mountain, Jay supposed they didn’t need another explanation.

Walt came from the house and stopped beside Harris, ash streaking one sleeve. “Could’ve been worse. Lodge is standing. House and big barn too.”

Harris looked toward the chimney. Walt said something about clearing the site and dealing with insurance, his comfort offered in the language he understood best: damage assessed, work identified, the next necessary thing put in order. Harris nodded when appropriate.

Then he began to cross the yard.

Harris had known the cabin was gone. Evan had told him at the hospital, and a fire crew had already seen enough of the foundation to know little would be salvageable.

Knowing had very little connection to seeing.

The cabin had never been much: one bedroom, a narrow kitchen, bathroom pipes that froze in serious cold, and a porch corner that had been sinking for three years because Harris kept finding repairs that mattered more. The living room had never recovered from Claire’s conviction that furniture ought to be arranged for conversation.

It had still been his.

Damp ash shifted beneath his boots as he moved through rooms that no longer existed except because he remembered where they had been. The kitchen table had stood beneath the window. His chair had been beside the stove. The bookshelves had covered most of the back wall, thick pine boards Harris had built himself and overloaded almost immediately.