Page 186 of The Fire Line

His family, the horses, and the work all depended on him returning to the same place every morning. His history remained in an abandoned doorway, his sister’s mare, his mother’s kitchen, and every fence repaired often enough that Harris remembered which posts would fail next.

Jay did not envy the limits of that life.

He envied its certainty.

He had never envied certainty before.

It was good to be home. That remained true.

Jay had expected the completeness of it to make Harris easier to leave behind.

Instead, Harris kept turning up in fragments.

A bookstore window displayed an old paperback with a pair of dark-rimmed reading glasses folded across the open pages. A man outside a bar cupped one hand around a cigarette against the wind. Someone behind Jay on the subway said yup in a voice so entirely wrong that he almost turned around to look for the correct one. Once, a barista gave Jay coffee so terrible that his phone was halfway out of his pocket before he remembered there was no established reason to send Harris photographic evidence of it.

There were dozens of moments like that now, observations arrived already shaped for Harris. Jay would see something irritating, funny, beautiful, or badly constructed and know exactly what Harris would say about it.

It did not help that Jay spent most of his working hours looking at the man.

Harris entered the edit suite whenever footage from Shaw Ranch appeared on the monitor.

Beside a corral, listening more closely than his expression suggested. Walking through wet ash with his injured hand held near his body. Standing inside the ruins of his cabin before looking directly into Jay’s camera for three silent seconds and turning away.

Jay had watched those seconds too many times. He called it professional scrutiny.

Harris’s face contained several possible edits, and the sequence required care. Jay needed to make sure the film did not turn survival into nobility or destruction into something aesthetically satisfying. He needed to preserve the distinction between what Harris consented to reveal and what Jay knew only because he had been close enough to hear him plead.

The camera had recorded Harris among the ruins.

It had not recorded Harris counting Jay’s breaths through the night. It had not recorded don’t leave me or I can’t lose you, too.

Those belonged to Harris, and they also belonged to Jay, whether or not Harris had intended to give them.

At the next corner, Romy stopped before the subway entrance.

A mounted police officer waited beside a line of cars. The horse moved restlessly beneath him, lifting its head as the officer shortened the reins again.

“Harris would hate his hands,” Jay muttered.

Romy’s expression softened. She hooked her arm through his without comment.

She no longer required an explanation when Harris entered a conversation without warning. Jay had spent the past five weeks giving her everything he refused to send west: observations, complaints, fragments of the fire, and admissions disguised as evidence in a case he had not decided to make.

Romy had not teased him much. That alone told Jay how worried she was.

“You know you’ll have to talk to him eventually,” she said as they reached the subway stairs.

“About the film.”

“Sure.”

“Evan is still the ranch contact.”

“True.” Romy looked at him. “But is that really what you want?”

Jay considered the question. The problem was not that it would be painful to hear from Harris, though it probably would be. It was the kind of conversation they would be expected to have.

An email requesting footage approval. A polite question about the reconstruction. Harris answering in three careful sentences as though the last weeks in Montana had happened to different people.