2. Chapter 2 - Savannah #3
The jeans are faded where jeans actually fade—thighs and knees and the back right pocket where he keeps his gloves. The flannel is a flannel because Montana is cold and flannel is warm, full stop, no aesthetic intention behind it whatsoever.
He can ride—not the way I ride, not English, not with his heels down, and his hands soft, and his diagonals correct—but he can ride the hell out of a horse in a way that makes my education look like a performance, which, to be fair, it mostly was.
He can rope, and cut, and work cattle in ways the television gets approximately thirty percent right, and he can break a green horse with a patience and a precision that I have watched with my own two eyes and still cannot fully account for.
He has broken many horses. He has never once bragged about it.
He's real.
And I'm just now noticin' it—really noticin' it, the way you notice a crack in the ceiling only after you've been lyin' awake beneath it for years and years and suddenly one morning the light hits different and there it is, unmistakable, undeniable, permanent.
Right here. Right now. Standing in the middle of my own life like a guest who arrived without luggage and doesn't seem to need any, I am noticin' that he is authentic in a way I have never once managed to be—not even on my best days.
Legitimate and bona fide in a way that my four-point-two million followers, and my mother's eight-point-two, and every golden-hour photograph ever taken of me in a field I was staged in cannot touch, cannot approximate, cannot fake their way into.
I was curated before I could speak in full sentences.
He was just... formed.
By cold and hunger and necessity and all the things that make a person real instead of made.
Cash shoots me a look that says his patience with my Victorian Lady display is thoroughly, unequivocally spent. It's the look he reserves for livestock that won't load and ranch hands who show up smelling like last night's mistakes—flat and tired and three seconds from decisive action.
He pulls his Stetson off and turns it in his hands once.
"He's fuckin' pissed, Savannah." His voice is quiet, which is worse than if he'd shouted it. "I get it—it's your life. Mother never let you have one, so this is your… rebellious phase, or whatever. You do you. I'm not gonna stand here and pretend I don't understand it."
He pauses, and for just a half-second something almost like sorrow crosses his face, the kind that comes from knowin' the truth and wishin' he didn't.
"I'm okay with it, I guess." He sets the hat back on his head, squares the brim. "But Marcus…" He blows out a slow breath, shakin' his head like the name itself costs him somethin' to say.
"He what, Cash? What did he do?"
"He's got a team of lawyers on us."
"For what?" I say, and the sneer that comes with it is not my most elegant moment, but I can't help it, and I don't try.
Cash lets out a breath. "The engagement. It was arranged, Savannah. There was a deal. Mother did it. Years ago."
I laugh.
I actually laugh—a real one, short and sharp and a little bit ugly.
Because of course there was a deal. Of course I was a line item.
Of course Eleanor, who turned my entire childhood into a content strategy, would also go ahead and sell me before she died, tying the bow on her legacy with my future like it was hers to give away. Of course she did.
"What does he want?"
"Besides you?" Cash says it flat, no softening, the way he delivers every piece of news that's gonna leave a mark. "Money. The ranch. Even the fuckin' photographs."
I sit up on the couch and swing my legs over the side, and for a moment I just look at him, because I need a second to let the full shape of that settle.
The money I understand.
The ranch I expected.
But the photographs—my God, Eleanor, the photographs—that is the detail that tells me exactly what kind of man Marcus White Junior really is. You don't reach for a dead woman's archive unless you know what's in it. Unless someone told you it was worth reaching for.
"That's ridiculous," I say, and my voice is very calm, which means I am not calm at all. "It's all in a trust. Untouchable."
Cash looks at me the way he looked at me when I was twelve and convinced myself the frozen pond would hold. Patient. Certain. Already grieving what's about to happen.
"Not true." He says it quietly, which is worse than if he'd shouted it. "It is touchable. If you don't marry, Savannah. Marry respectable. Then the trust breaks and the ranch gets sold."
The breath that comes out of me is nothin' but a huff—small and reflexive, like the air just got knocked loose from somewhere behind my ribs.
Because this is Eleanor's architecture, down to the last beam. She didn't just build an empire while she was alive—she built a trap and set it to spring after she was gone, and I am standin' right in the middle of it in my good boots, and she is not here for me to ask why, or scream at, or forgive.
She is gone.
She is photographs and a will written in ink that didn't give a single damn about what I wanted.
She's haunting me from the grave.
And the infuriating, devastating thing about Eleanor Ashby is that… even her haunting is elegant.