Page 18 of The Fire Line

That was all. No explanation of documentary value, no promise to stay back while filming anyway, no bargaining for an angle that excluded the blood. He had offered to help, asked permission, accepted both answers, and gone.

Harris looked at the empty doorway half a second longer than the situation required, then returned his attention to Rain.

She had been Nell’s mare. Technically, Rain belonged to the ranch now, the same way Nell’s saddle, tack, and the boxes in Della’s attic belonged to the ranch. The paperwork had shifted. Nothing else had.

Rain was twenty, pale around the muzzle and stiffer through the hind legs than she used to be. Harris had known for years there would eventually be a last injury, a last winter, a last decision he did not want to make.

This wasn’t it.

Once he washed away the blood, the wound looked clean enough. No tendon involvement he could feel. Rain set the toe down when he asked her to shift, then accepted some weight.

Good.

Grief was easier when it came with instructions. Feed the mare. Check the leg. Fix the wire. Show up again tomorrow.

He moved Rain into a stall and flushed the wound again. Claire arrived twenty minutes later. Harris knew the sound of her SUV before it stopped outside the barn. Some things stayed in the body long after they stopped being useful.

She came down the aisle carrying her field bag, hair already escaping the knot at the back of her neck. “How bad?”

“Inside lower leg. Wire.”

“Deep?”

“Don’t think so. She’s bearing a bit of weight.”

Claire set down the bag and entered the stall. After that, they barely needed words. Harris shifted Rain before Claire asked, handed over gauze when she reached toward her bag, and adjusted the light when she leaned closer. When Rain sidestepped, Claire caught Harris by the wrist for balance without looking. Her hand was gone again a second later.

Nothing about the contact felt strange. That was probably the strangest part.

Twelve years of marriage left habits behind. Claire still knew where Harris would stand before he moved there; he could tell which instrument she wanted by the position of her hand. They had spent too many nights in barns, clinics, and the cab of her truck for those things to disappear because they had signed some divorce papers.

Sometimes Harris wished the habits had been enough.

Life with Claire had been good. She had been good. He had wanted her, loved her, and built most of his adult life with her. Imagined his future with her. There had been no betrayal or cruelty, nothing clean enough to point at and say there, that’s where the marriage had failed.

Claire had been ready for the next part before he was: children, a house that belonged to the two of them instead of Harris’s little cabin, a future planned farther ahead than the next calving season or Nell’s next PET scan. Harris had always found a reason to wait.

Then Nell got sick again, and waiting became reasonable. Necessary, even. What Harris had never told Claire was that beneath the fear and grief, some shameful part of him had also been relieved. The decision had been taken out of his hands. He could postpone the future without admitting he had already spent years postponing it.

By the time they finally looked at their marriage honestly, too much of it had been built around what they never said. Claire wanted the life they had talked about. Harris wanted to want it with the same certainty she did.

Turned out wanting to want something wasn’t the same as choosing it.

He had loved Claire. Some days he still wished that had made the rest simple.

It hadn’t.

Claire leaned closer to check the wound’s depth. A shape stood farther down the aisle.

Navarro. No camera this time.

He rested one shoulder against the wall, watching quietly from a distance that would not crowd Rain or the people working around her. His attention moved from Claire’s hands to the bandage supplies and then to Harris holding the mare’s head.

What did the scene look like from there? A veterinarian and the former husband who already knew what she needed. Familiarity without marriage. A whole history visible in the space between two people who barely spoke.

Harris tightened his hand on the lead rope. Why the hell did he care what Navarro made of it?

Claire began wrapping Rain’s leg, and Harris looked back down.