29. Four Days
Four Days
By Thursday, the ranch had settled into the first ugly rhythm of recovery.
Priya turned her laptop toward Jay and Eli. “We can finish the remaining interviews tomorrow, pickups Saturday, final backups Saturday night. We leave Sunday morning.”
The conference room had already begun returning itself to the ranch.
Charging cables were coming off the walls, equipment cases stood closed near the door, and the table where Jay had spent most of the summer reviewing footage was covered now with insurance folders and contractor estimates.
He looked at the date in the corner of the screen.
Thursday. Four days, if he counted the hours Sunday morning they would spend loading cases and checking equipment before the drive to Bozeman.
It was enough. They had the interviews, the fire footage, the return to the ranch, and more material than Jay would ever be able to use. Staying longer because disaster had given the film a more dramatic ending would be exactly the kind of thing he had spent his career trying not to do.
“Sunday,” he said.
Priya watched him for one beat longer than necessary. “Unless there’s something you think we still need.”
There were things Jay wanted to see: Harris repairing fence, Rain back in pasture, the first ordinary morning when the fire was no longer the most important thing that had happened to everyone. None of it was editorial need.
“We’re good.”
Priya moved on to flights and equipment assignments, and Jay took notes while the room became a departure list around him.
Leaving was not usually difficult. He liked movement and had spent most of his adult life learning how to belong intensely somewhere without mistaking that for permanence.
A room stopped being theirs, the cases closed, and whatever attachment had formed became messages everyone genuinely intended to send.
This felt different, and not only because of Harris, although Jay knew how useful that qualification was.
The ranch was damaged. The north barn was gone.
Harris’s cabin had become a chimney and a handful of objects dug from ash.
Leaving now felt less like completing the work than stepping away precisely when the spectacle ended and the harder, less cinematic part began.
All of that was true. It simply wasn’t the whole truth.
Jay closed his laptop. “I’ll tell Harris.”
* * *
Harris was repairing the lower pasture fence when Jay found him.
The bandage on his hand had shrunk since the hospital, though he was still working mostly left-handed and pretending the adjustment cost him nothing.
He noticed Jay before he reached the fence line and rested the post driver against his thigh.
“Everything okay?”
“We’re leaving Sunday.”
Harris went still for half a second. “That soon?”
“We have what we need.”
His gaze moved toward the unfinished fence. “Probably makes sense.”
Jay had crossed the pasture knowing perfectly well that Harris was unlikely to object, but hearing him fail to object still landed badly.
“We’ll finish tomorrow and Saturday. Leave early Sunday for Bozeman.”
Harris nodded with exactly the reasonable, practical response Jay had expected, which irritated him more than it should have.
“You’re taking this very well.”
Harris still wasn’t looking directly at him. “What’m I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.”
That was the problem. Jay had no right to expect Harris to produce something he himself had not been willing to say.
Farther down the fence, Evan and Noah worked within sight. Harris glanced toward them before asking, “You got enough for the film?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
Jay should have left it there. Instead he said, “You asked me to stay with you.”
Harris’s hand tightened around the post driver. “What?”
“On the mountain.”
“You were havin’ trouble breathing.”
“I know.”
“Needed you awake.”
Jay remembered that. He also remembered Harris’s hands against his face, the fear beneath his voice, and fragments of words that had followed him into the hospital even when he could no longer place them in order.
“You said it like it mattered.”
Harris finally met his eyes. “It did. You could’ve died.”
Nothing about the explanation was false, which somehow made it worse.
“Right.”
Jay turned, but Harris said his name before he had taken more than a step. When Jay looked back, Harris seemed to have reached the edge of something. His mouth opened, his attention flicked toward Evan, and whatever he had nearly said disappeared.
“You should get back.”
Jay waited a second longer than dignity recommended before nodding. “Sure.”
He crossed the pasture without looking behind him.
* * *
For the next two days, Harris gave Jay exactly the amount of distance Jay had never asked for.
He was everywhere and somehow never with him: beside the adjusters, along the fence line, at meals, crossing the yard with tools in his good hand.
Whenever Jay coughed, Harris still looked up, and whenever he carried anything heavier than a camera battery, Harris seemed to materialize nearby with an objection. Otherwise, he left him alone.
By Saturday afternoon, Jay had had enough of being respectfully avoided.
He found Harris stretching wire in the lower pasture and picked up one of the replacement posts.
“What’re you doing?”
“Helping.”
“You got packing.”
“I delegated.”
“To Eli?”
“Obviously.”
The corner of Harris’s mouth shifted, and that small reaction was enough to keep Jay there for the next hour.
They worked without much conversation, and the repetition helped: carry the post, hold the wire, tighten it, move on.
It gave Jay somewhere to put the pressure building beneath his ribs as Sunday drew closer.
He caught himself wondering how long the western fence would take to finish, then the barn, then everything else the fire had interrupted.
Harris would not do any of it alone. He had Evan, Walt, ranch hands, neighbors, people who had arrived with food and equipment before the roads fully reopened.
Jay was not necessary, but he wanted to stay anyway, and that was the part he did not trust.
Wanting had made temporary arrangements look sustainable before.
He could stay a few weeks, work remotely, tell himself they were only buying time.
Then he would leave for New York, another shoot, wherever work sent him next, and perhaps come back when he could.
Harris might learn to expect him in pieces.
Miles had done that for years.
Jay had loved him and still built the relationship around his own departures until Miles stopped asking for more because there was no point. He would not do that to Harris merely because leaving hurt.
The knowledge should have stopped him. It didn’t.
“I could stay for a while,” he said.
Harris’s hands stopped on the wire.
“A couple weeks. Maybe longer. Priya can start the assembly. Most of what I need can happen from a laptop.”
Jay had checked. He had looked at flights, meetings, editing space. This was not an offer that had occurred to him spontaneously in a pasture.
Harris stared at him. “You got work.”
“So do you.”
“Ain’t your work.”
“No.”
Harris looked down at his bandaged hand. “You don’t need to stay because the ranch burned.”
“I know.”
“Or ’cause of what happened on the mountain.”
“I know that too.”
When Harris looked up, Jay saw the answer before he managed to hide it. The want was plain enough that Jay’s chest tightened, and for one second he thought Harris might finally say what neither of them had been willing to name.
Instead Harris looked away.
“You should go home Sunday.”
The words landed with almost surgical precision.
Jay lowered the post. “Is that what you want?”
Harris said nothing. A few yards away, Noah worked with his back to them, and farther uphill a truck moved along the ranch road. They had privacy only in the technical sense.
“Sunday’s the right call,” Harris said.
It still wasn’t an answer.
Jay could have pressed him. He could have made Harris look at him and say either stay or go, but some mixture of pride, self-preservation, and the memory of Miles accepting less and less until there was nothing left worth asking for stopped him.
“All right.”
“Jay.”
He waited. Again Harris looked close to saying something, and again nothing came.
“I should finish packing.”
Harris nodded, and Jay walked back toward the lodge before he could make the offer twice.
* * *
Harris watched him go with the answer still trapped behind his teeth.
He wanted Jay to stay. Two weeks, three, however long Jay was willing to give him.
He wanted him working from the lodge, leaving cables where they didn’t belong, appearing in doorways with questions Harris pretended not to want answered.
He wanted to hear him laughing through open windows and coughing somewhere close enough that Harris could look up and confirm he was all right.
The wanting itself wasn’t the problem. What frightened Harris was what staying would require.
For weeks, secrecy had been easy to call temporary because Jay’s departure was fixed.
If he remained, Harris would be asking him to live inside it deliberately: nights behind closed doors, mornings spent pretending nothing had happened, Harris checking where Jay was whenever somebody else might notice.
People were already noticing. Evan had seen the way Harris watched Jay at the cabin ruins and quietly left them alone.
Walt had been civil with Jay since Miles came up at dinner, but Harris had noticed the slight reserve that hadn’t been there before.
They had nearly died together, which gave everyone a reasonable explanation for Harris’s new vigilance, but he did not know how long that explanation would hold.
More than that, he could not ask Jay to make himself smaller so Harris could remain hidden.
That did not mean he wanted him gone.