Page 39 of The Fire Line

Except Navarro kept recognizing the line before Harris had to show it to him.

Rain bleeding in the barn. Della now. Even the cattle that morning, when he had left thousands of dollars of equipment sitting open beside the road because helping mattered more than getting the footage.

Competence Harris understood. It could be measured. Either somebody followed an instruction or they didn’t. Either they could handle themselves when things went wrong or they became another thing Harris had to manage.

Decency was harder to keep at a useful distance.

Navarro had not stopped filming Della because Harris was standing nearby. Harris had been too far away to stop him in time. He had done it because he had known, on his own, that the moment did not belong to him.

Harris went back to the latch because standing in a doorway watching Navarro be decent to his mother seemed like an exceptionally poor use of his time.

The wrench turned once beneath his hand before he realized the bolt was already tight.

He lowered it.

That was the real trouble with the second piece of evidence. Beneath all the talking and wandering and general Navarro-ness was somebody Harris could trust to do exactly what was needed when it mattered. Worse, there appeared to be a decent man mixed in there too.

Harris liked him.

Not all of him, obviously. That would have been excessive.

Navarro remained irritating. He still asked questions Harris had no intention of answering, treated rules as the opening position in a negotiation, and possessed an almost supernatural ability to appear whenever Harris wanted five uninterrupted minutes. His driving remained questionable. His understanding of appropriate footwear had not improved nearly enough.

But Harris found that he kind of liked talking to the man.

He liked that Navarro could make Della laugh without trying too hard. He liked the way he paid attention when somebody gave him an answer he had not expected. He liked that Navarro could complain about ranch coffee for half an hour and then drop everything the second somebody actually needed him.

Attractive had been manageable when Harris could pair it with irrelevant.

Attractive, competent, and decent was a significantly worse combination.

Trust was still too large a word for a man Harris had known less than three weeks. Harris did not hand it out because somebody managed not to be an asshole in front of a camera. But the judgment he had made on Navarro’s first day no longer fit the available evidence, and refusing to update because he preferred the old answer was how small problems became expensive ones.

Fine. Navarro was not careless or cruel. He could follow instructions, knew when to put the camera down, and even possessed enough restraint not to congratulate himself every time he behaved like a decent human being.

Harris would account for that.

What he would not do was let any of it change how he behaved around the man.

Navarro liking men did not require Harris to watch him differently. It did not require him to reconsider every look he had caught across the barn or wonder whether Navarro’s teasing contained something Harris had not been listening for before. He would speak to him exactly the same way he always had, give him exactly the same amount of space, and stop examining harmless interactions for evidence of something that probably wasn’t there.

There was no reason for Navarro to notice anything.

That resolution lasted until the following Wednesday.

The third piece of evidence was waiting in the equipment room without a shirt on.

Harris had gone in for the fence radio.

That was all.

He had spent most of the afternoon replacing a section of wire along the west pasture and needed to check something with Evan before heading back out. The radios lived on the shelf inside the equipment room. Harris had walked through that door hundreds of times without the act requiring any particular thought.

He made it one step inside.

Navarro stood beside the worktable, pulling a T-shirt over his head.

Harris stopped.