Epilogue
“That ending was cowardly.”
“It was restrained.”
“It was afraid of its own premise!”
They had made it halfway down the block before Jay realized he and Romy had been arguing since they left the theater.
It was not his premiere, or even a documentary. Romy knew the director, Jay knew several people from the distributor, and for one evening he had been required to do nothing more professionally demanding than wear a jacket and form opinions.
He had excelled at both, naturally.
“The entire film was about a woman refusing to admit what she wanted,” Jay said as they waited at the corner. “Then, at the exact moment she might have done something emotionally inconvenient, it cut to a fucking train.”
“The train was symbolic.”
“Yeah. Symbolic of public transportation.”
Romy gave him the look she reserved for occasions when he had become both insufferable and predictable. “You’re projecting.”
“Onto the train?”
“Onto the ending.”
The light changed, and Jay stepped into the crosswalk before she could elaborate.
New York had reclaimed him without difficulty.
His apartment had been almost exactly as he left it, except for a shelf Romy claimed she had not rearranged and a stack of mail tall enough to suggest several government agencies had become concerned about him.
The shelf was obviously her work. Three months earlier, Romy had declared it “structurally incoherent” while measuring Jay’s living room for a client project she was finishing nearby.
Now the books had been reordered by height, two objects had migrated from the bedroom, and a ceramic bowl Jay did not remember owning sat where his camera batteries used to be.
“It was like that when I got here,” she told him.
“You have a key.”
“Circumstantial.”
His calendar had filled within three days: screenings, meetings, editing sessions, dinners postponed during the shoot, and friends who required several months of gossip to be absorbed in a single evening.
His first Sunday back, his mother summoned him to Astoria, where two of her sisters talked over one another in Greek while his father argued with his brother in Spain over speakerphone.
Jay’s mother continued adding food to his plate while demanding an accurate account of the fire, then interrupted every time the account became more accurate than she wanted.
His father asked practical questions about road access, livestock evacuation, and emergency water before declaring Shaw Ranch’s entire fire plan inadequate, as though he had personally inspected the property and been disappointed by its management.
One of Jay’s aunts wanted to know whether the horses survived. The other wanted to know whether the handsome rancher in the photographs was married.
Jay answered one of those questions.
He left carrying three containers of food, a bottle of wine his father claimed nobody in Brooklyn could appreciate properly, and instructions from both sides of the family to call more often.
Jay loved it.
He loved ordering food after midnight. He loved the noise from the street and the woman across the courtyard whose windowsill garden had begun colonizing the fire escape. He loved the coffee shop near the corner, even though the new barista insisted on calling him Jake.
The city continued in every direction at once, dense enough that solitude required effort and silence had to be actively sought. His life had not waited in suspended animation. It had continued without him, then closed around him again almost immediately, familiar and complete.
Jay had always understood belonging as being welcomed back.
His family complained about his absences while preparing for his return. His friends accumulated stories for him. Work continued without him and made space when he came home.
Harris’s belonging looked different.
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.
Professional contact would require them to pretend there was nothing beneath it. Silence, at least, did not ask Jay to participate in the pretense.
“I don’t really know,” he admitted.
Romy’s arm tightened briefly through his. “I haven’t seen you like this before.”
Jay looked down toward the subway entrance. “I’m fine.”
After a moment, she asked, “Have you thought about going on a date?”
Jay turned his head slowly. “That was a fairly aggressive change of subject.”
“It’s not entirely unrelated.”
“I don’t need to be rehabilitated through cocktails with a stranger.”
“I’m not trying to rehabilitate you.” Romy leaned lightly against his shoulder. “I’m asking whether you plan to keep your entire life on hold while you wait to find out what Harris does with his.”
It was difficult to imagine Harris putting anything on hold for Jay.
Harris was probably too busy rebuilding fences, negotiating insurance, and making decisions about the ranch to spend much time grieving whatever had ended between them.
Jay could picture him moving through each day with the same grim competence he brought to every other disaster, accepting the additional work without complaint and sleeping only when his body forced the issue.
Harris had an entire life arranged around being useful. Pining over a man in New York did not seem like something he would permit to interfere with it.
Perhaps he had already begun moving on.
The possibility had occurred to Jay more often than he would have admitted even to Romy.
Harris could have downloaded an app, selected a photograph in which he did not look actively hostile, and driven into town to meet someone.
Jay had practically encouraged him to do exactly that.
He had even pretended the prospect sounded exciting.
Five weeks later, the thought still pressed against the same small place behind Jay’s ribs.
“I’m not ready,” he said.
“Okay.”
Romy did not tell him he would be eventually. She did not insist that someone better was waiting within a geographically reasonable radius or that he needed closure before the feeling became chronic.
“You’ll call tomorrow?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Romy squeezed his arm once before releasing him and disappeared down the subway stairs.
Jay walked the remaining blocks alone.