Page 172 of The Fire Line

He stopped there.

Field guides. Ranch records. Veterinary manuals. Paperbacks with cracked spines. Nell’s books mixed with his because she had spent most of their lives treating ownership as negotiable.

Lonesome Dove had been there. So had Middlemarch, left near the bed with his glasses folded over the cover.

There was nothing left to distinguish one book from another.

“Damn it.”

Evan had followed him partway across the yard and now stood several yards behind.

“Books?”

Harris nodded.

Evan waited, perhaps expecting more, but Harris had already said as much as he could manage with Walt. The lodge had survived. The house had survived. The horses had survived. Everybody kept giving him reasons this could have been worse, and they were right.

That did not make this nothing.

“Want help looking?” Evan asked.

“Not yet.”

“All right.”

Evan left him alone.

Harris crouched near what had been the bedroom and began shifting pieces of plaster and burned wood with his left hand. Most disintegrated when he touched them. The small metal box beneath his bed should have been somewhere near the foundation wall, and after several minutes he found one blackened corner beneath a fallen joist.

The lid had warped. He was still trying to force it open one-handed when Evan reappeared, took the box without comment, and worked his pocketknife beneath the edge.

Inside, the photographs had fused into a dark block and most of the letters crumbled when exposed to air. Beneath them, Harris found Nell’s silver horse.

It was nearly black, one leg bent and its mane softened by heat, but recognizable. Nell had bought it at a gas-station gift shop when she was twelve because Harris said it looked nothing like a real horse.

She had told him that was why he needed it.

Harris closed his fingers around it.

A brass key lay beneath it, the faded blue ribbon tied through the top partly melted away. Claire’s. It had not opened anything in years, but Harris had kept it because twelve years of his life had not become meaningless when the marriage ended.

The ribbon broke apart beneath his thumb.

Something in Harris went with it.

Not visibly, he hoped. Evan was beside him, and Walt and Della were somewhere across the yard, and there were insurance people and fire crews and a hundred things that needed doing before dark. Harris had become very good at giving grief only the amount of space available.

Then a cough sounded behind him.

He turned.

Jay stood just outside the foundation in the same clothes he had worn back from the hospital, his face tired and pale beneath the lingering traces of soot that no amount of washing seemed to have completely removed.

Harris looked at his chest first.

He knew he did it. He no longer seemed capable of stopping.

Jay noticed too.