8. Chapter 8 - Savannah
The next several days pass with a kind of certainty that only comes from patterns.
Which is a very human thing. How we find rhythm in the strange and call it normal.
How we let the odd settle into routine until we can't even remember what it looked like before it clouded up.
Two things happen that help this pattern recognition along.
First, the weather.
It's unseasonably warm, and in eastern Montana that's not a small thing. Fall here doesn't knock, it arrives like a creditor. Sudden and unapologetic. And it has been known to show up in the dead of August with an attitude.
We are long past August now. And yet the ranch is still warm in the afternoons, the sun is still comin' up every morning like it means it, and the cool nights have no bite to 'em.
The second thing is Marcus and his sick brand of devotion. Which has taken on a frequency and a fervor that I can only describe as… presidential.
Which is to say, performative, relentless, and completely divorced from any consideration of what I might actually want.
He starts leavin' daily threats like he's committed to a new-year-new-me routine. Texts, and voicemails, and emails, and snail mail—actual envelopes, hand-addressed, stamped and dropped through the slot like it's 1987 and his feelings are a utility bill I've neglected to pay.
You name the channel, he exploits it.
He speaks it, sends it, mails it, types it in all capital letters at two in the morning like the caps lock is doing the emotional heavy lifting he cannot manage himself.
I read every single one. I don't know why.
Maybe because my mother taught me that ignoring something doesn't make it disappear—it just means you didn't document it properly.
Maybe because I need to know the temperature of him, the way you check a wound not because you want to see it but because you need to know if it's getting worse.
It is getting worse.
His obsession with me is so thorough, so perfectly engineered, it's—and I say this with the kind of clarity that only comes from distance—both frightening and genuinely impressive.
That's a terrible thing to admit, and I understand this. But wrapping an ultimatum into the syntax of devotion, making a threat sound like a love letter, dialing the frequency of control so fine you can't look away—that's a talent.
Half the women I know would scroll past it and call it romance.
Marcus has that talent. Apparently.
The total commitment of it is scary good.
Heavy on the scary, light on the good.
Because there's something really wrong with his reaction.
Obviously, he's psychotic. I don't say that as hyperbole and I don't say it as a woman scorned, I say it as someone who has had the singular and frankly illuminating experience of bein' kidnapped, cleaned, and then tied to a bed for days while he kept me sedated and compliant so he could fed me cherry pie like it’s a reasonable thing to do to a person you claim to love.
That actually happened to me.
That is a true series of events in my actual life.
And yet, the most astonishing thing about Marcus White Jr. is not the psychosis.
The truly stunning thing is his entitlement.
And I don't use that word lightly. I am not bein' careless with it, not slingin' it around the way people do on social media when they mean something that's really just annoyance dressed up in the vocabulary of grievance.
I mean it the way it's meant to be used.
Entitlement as inheritance, as atmosphere, as the particular quality of air that surrounds a person who has never once been told no and had it stick.
Entitlement is something that gets bred into a child. It doesn't arrive all at once. It accumulates. It's in the way a door is held, and the way an apology is given, and the way a room rearranges itself around a person before they've even finished walkin' through it.
It lives in the expectation that the world will continue to organize itself in your favor, not because you've earned it but because it always has, and that kind of history feels like proof.
Ask me how I know.
I was raised up in entitlement. Raised through it, the way a vine is trained up a garden wall—patiently, persistently, until the shape of it is just the shape of you and you can't remember growing any other way.
Beyond the longing for something as simple and ruinous as privacy or as desirable as Legion's hands on my body in the dark—I have never lacked a single thing in my entire life.
Not once. Not even close.
I wake up every morning expecting this ranch to be here.
Expectin' Cassia to be in her stall, warm, and solid, and smelling like hay and horse sweat. Her dark bay coat already brushed by the time I get to the barn because someone on staff has been up since four a.m. making sure of it.
I expect the grass to be green in the summer because our irrigation system doesn't know what failure looks like.
I expect the mile-long driveway to be plowed before I ever need to drive it, and I expect that expectation to go unnoticed, unremarked upon, folded so quietly into the texture of daily life that it doesn't even register as a luxury.
There is not one crevice of my mind where doubt about any of this lives.
That's entitlement.
And this is how Marcus sees me.
This is the inventory he ran when Eleanor introduced us, or sold me—whichever it was.
He didn't see me as his wife.
He saw what I had. These entitlements about me that he could now possess.
I'm his ranch.
I'm his stabled horse.
I'm his water rights.
I'm his snow plow.
The difference between Marcus and me is that I know what I am.
And he has never once stopped to consider himself.
I'm sittin' at the breakfast table having all these thoughts when Cash comes in, huffin' and mumblin' as he takes his seat and picks up the cup of black coffee that was poured for him the moment he entered the room.
Entitlement is a stunning thing all in itself, once you notice it.
"What's wrong with you?" I ask.
He shoots me a look that could kill a coyote from two hundred yards. "What's wrong with me? Your psychotic ex-boyfriend, that's what's wrong with me."
"Ah. I see he's livin' rent free in your head too."
He's taking a sip of coffee when I say this, almost chokes on it. "That's not funny," he manages around a cough.
But we both think it kinda is.
That's entitlement too.
We are so convinced of our insulation, our collective annoyance at Marcus White Jr.'s commitment to ruining our lives isn't even enough to make an aspen leaf quake, let alone realign the ground beneath our feet.
"We have to do something about him, Savannah."
I raise one eyebrow. "Do something such as…"
He lets out a long breath. "You know. We need to… take care of him."
"Take care of him how, Cash?"
He leans back in his chair, eyes going distant.
"Never mind. I'll handle it. Anyway, my day is fuckin' booked.
Got a dispersal over in Glendive I want to sit in on, the Hendle outfit finally came apart, so there's about two hundred head of their momma cows going through the ring this afternoon.
Then I gotta meet with Landry about that section north of the creek before some developer gets cute with it.
And if I'm back by four, Cal's bringing over a bull prospect he won't shut up about. "
"So you're shopping today?" I ask, casually taking a sip of my own coffee.
"I'm not shopping, I'm—" He just stops. Because when you boil it all down, that's all Cash does. He buys things. Things we need, absolutely. But it's shoppin' nonetheless.
His chair scrapes back on the hardwoods and he stands up, reaching for his hat that spent breakfast time on the chair next to him. He puts it on his head and says, "Have a nice day, Savannah."
Then he walks out, huffin' and grumblin' the same way he walked in.
Marcus. He's gettin' to all of us.
Well, two of us.
Because God knows where Wyatt is. He's wearing his entitlement on his sleeve these days. Sleepin' in the cabin on the far side of the east pasture, never shows up for meals anymore, and I can't even remember the last time he actually did work around here.
And Colt is just… gone.
I miss him terribly.
The past few months have been devastatingly, crushingly disruptive. Last spring, the four of us sat at this table together twice a day. It was a ritual instilled in us as children. No one skipped breakfast or dinner. Not even Wyatt when he was going through his “cocaine phase”.
Now, it's like that life never existed. Cash only came in here and sat down out of habit. But he's soon gonna realize—maybe next week, maybe next month—that he doesn't have to anymore. And then he won't.
At least when Mercy and Legion were here, dinner was an actual event.
Now, it's just Cash and me being performative.
And it's not gonna last.
It's defeating, actually, to realize that the mother you both love and hate was the only thing holding this family together. That her high expectations and strict protocols actually shaped something special.
Shaped the whole meaning of the word “family” from the Ashby perspective.
The spirit of all that she was, all that she poured into us, lingers still.
But it's fading like an expensive perfume dotted on your wrist this morning. Fleeting and evanescent.
And soon, it'll be gone and it won't ever be back.
I sit with this for a few minutes. Pushing eggs around my plate, sipping coffee sweetened with vanilla creamer, imagining life after Eleanor's soul finally departs for better places.
And I realize… I can't live with it.
I spend the day wandering around the house, around the barn, around anything I can, feeling quite lost. Not able to admit that I am in mourning for the Little Ashby Princess.
Eleanor's death was some time ago now and the thrice daily uploads of me stopped well before that, so it's not like I've been walking through my day with the weight of a camera on me.
But it's always been there, in spirit at least.
And now… it definitively is not.
There's an emptiness.