Page 5 of The Fire Line

Jay watched Harris disappear into the shed.

Interesting definition of hospitality.

They spent the next hour unloading and scouting. Evan showed them which buildings were private: his parents’ house among the cottonwoods, the house beyond the lower corrals where he and Elise lived with the twins, and Harris’s cabin farther south through the trees. Priya established the equipment room, Eli inspected every camera body after the drive, and Della reappeared with sandwiches she insisted did not count as either lunch or dinner. At the main barn, Harris was adjusting a saddle on a dark bay gelding. His attention went first to the cases entering the doorway, then to the horse, then back to the people carrying them—a complete threat assessment in under three seconds.

“No strapping any of that to a horse until I see exactly what you’re doing.”

“We don’t mount cameras on animals without a specialist,” Jay said.

Harris ran one hand along the gelding’s back, checking the saddle. “You’ve got one.”

“Good to know.”

“Means you ask first.”

“Understood.”

Harris gave him a level look before returning to the saddle. Approval, apparently, or the nearest local equivalent.

The guest side of the ranch was more polished than Jay had expected, built to accommodate weddings and people who wanted horses in their photographs without having to actually know anything about them. Beyond it, the ranch stopped performing. Machinery sat beneath open sheds, fences followed the land, and dust settled wherever it pleased.

Better. Jay trusted things that had not been arranged for him.

Inside, the lodge was all heavy timber, worn leather, and broad windows facing the mountains. The furniture looked chosen to survive muddy boots rather than impress anyone, and the air carried faint traces of coffee, woodsmoke, and horse.

Upstairs, Jay’s room overlooked the driveway and a set of corrals. The floor complained under every step, making privacy mostly theoretical. He opened the window.

Metal struck metal near the sheds. A horse called from one of the corrals, followed by the distant laugh of a child. Between the sounds lay more empty space than Jay was accustomed to having around him.

He unpacked enough to find clean clothes and the charger he had somehow buried beneath three camera batteries. Dinner was still over an hour away. The protein bar in his backpack had been flattened into something resembling roofing material, but hunger lowered his standards considerably. He had taken two bites when his phone buzzed with a voice message from Romy.

“Nobody here believes you’re actually in Montana. Your mother called me because you didn’t answer fast enough, so I told her you were probably working—” Wind rushed across the microphone, followed by the electronic chirp of a crosswalk signal. Romy must be walking home from the train. “—which was obviously a tactical error, because now she thinks you’re already in danger. I suggest you call somebody before both sides of the family mobilize.”

Jay smiled. Romy was not related to him, but both sides of his family had absorbed her years ago, so completely that nobody bothered with the distinction anymore. His mother called her when Jay got quiet. His cousins included her in arguments she had not asked to join. And Aunt Eleni sent her home with food in quantities more appropriate for a household of six.

Hearing her voice pulled the rest of home in behind it: his mother walking into his old Astoria bedroom without knocking, though he had not lived there in sixteen years. His father making coffee strong enough to stain ceramic permanently. Spanish from one room, Greek from another, English shouted over both because volume had become the family’s only shared dialect.

Jay’s family loved him loudly and complained about his travel schedule with equal commitment. His mother had stopped asking whether he would be home for things and started asking whether she should save him a seat. Jay always meant to become better at answering and showing up. Then another shoot came along, and the intention followed him onto the next plane.

When he was in New York, he lived alone in Fort Greene—technically. Romy had a key, Priya had once occupied his couch for three weeks, and various relatives treated the apartment as a package-receiving facility with heating. He traveled too often for solitude to become a habit.

His family had a predictable rhythm whenever he arrived somewhere new. For the first few days, the group chat filled with questions about flights, roads, food, and whether he had remembered to sleep. By the second week, the messages usually thinned out—partly because everyone relaxed, partly because Jay became unreliable about answering once a project took hold.

He opened the family chat and sent the update they were waiting for.

Alive. Made it.

Replies began arriving before he could finish the protein bar.

By the time the dinner bell rang, Jay had answered enough of them to prevent an international search effort. He showered off the road dust, pulled his hair into a loose bun, and headed downstairs.

Dinner was loud enough to feel briefly familiar. Walt sat near one end of the long table, having introduced himself during the scouting walk with a handshake, three questions about drone insurance, and no interest in conversational padding. Della occupied the other end in theory. In practice, she kept rising to check a serving dish, speak quietly to one of the kitchen staff, or redirect a plate before it reached the wrong end of the table.

Evan and Elise managed the twins between them. Willa ate from three plates and denied involvement in all of them, while June arranged her vegetables according to a principle nobody else was permitted to understand.

Walt asked Priya about the drone permits. Della pressed another helping on Eli despite his increasingly sincere insistence that he was full, and conversation moved easily around the table.

After dinner, Priya reviewed the following day’s schedule with Jay in the conference room while Eli checked batteries at the far end of the table.