31. Take Care of Yourself
Take Care of Yourself
Harris woke because the room was empty.
For one disoriented second, nothing seemed wrong. The blanket still covered his legs, the refrigerator hummed beyond the bedroom, and early light had begun turning the western window gray. Then he reached across the mattress and found cool sheets.
“Jay?”
No answer came from the bathroom or living room.
Jay’s boots were gone from beside the bed. So was the shirt Harris had held while he slept, along with the small bag Jay had brought over the night before. A rinsed glass stood upside down beside the sink, and six twelve glowed on the clock.
The mountain returned before Harris could stop it: Jay’s arm slipping loose around his neck, his body going slack against Harris’s back, the terrible absence of breath where breath should have been.
Harris was out of bed before reason caught up, crossing the cabin barefoot with his heart hammering hard enough to hurt.
He opened the door.
The production van was gone. No equipment cases waited beside the lodge steps, and no voices carried from the kitchen. Two parallel tracks cut through the damp gravel, curved past the cottonwoods, and disappeared down the ranch road.
Jay was gone.
Harris gripped the doorframe until he could separate the empty yard from the mountain.
His phone lay facedown on the table beside the insurance forms. One message waited on the screen, sent forty-three minutes earlier.
Jay: Take care of yourself.
Harris read it twice.
Four ordinary words. The sort either of them could have said in a yard full of people, with both hands in their pockets and everyone pretending not to watch.
He touched the reply field and typed You too, but the answer looked thin on the screen. After a moment, he deleted it.
Jay had offered to stay. Harris had told him Sunday was right, and Jay had taken him at his word. He had done exactly what Harris allowed him to do: packed his life back into its cases and gone on to the next place.
The bed remained unmade behind him. One pillow carried the shallow impression of Jay’s head, and the blanket had been pushed toward the foot on his side.
Harris stopped beside it.
The quiet was not new. He had lived inside it for years. What was new was knowing exactly who was missing from it.
He locked the phone without answering.
Outside, the tire tracks disappeared down the road.