Page 17 of Iron and Ivory

Which makes the whole situation feel, from the outside, like exactly what my brothers would call it.

Trashy.

That's the word. I know it is.

But if this is trashy—if this is what trashy looks like, lit lanterns, and solar fairy lights, and a cathedral of stars—then I suppose I can live with it.

Cassia stops without me askin' her to. She always does. She knows where we are the same way I do. She never needs me to explain myself. She just knows.

After I slide down off her bare back I slip her bridle off in one easy motion and she doesn't even wait. She already knows the assignment. She drops her head and wanders off toward what's left of the summer scrub, content, unhurried, perfectly certain that I'll still be here when she's ready, and I envy her that certainty more than I can say.

I cross the soft dirt with bare feet and hang the bridle on the tree limb the way I always do. Same branch, dead since the first time I ever came here, and still holdin'.

And isn't it funny, I think, the way dead things can be so perfect like that.

So useful.

So quietly, stubbornly beautiful.

I resist the urge to check my phone. To check the time. To pollute this IRL moment with things that don't belong.

I know I left very early, but I took my time. If he's comin', he should be here soon.

I go inside the silo and everything is just as we left it. The fairy lights glow faintly, like the limits of their usefulness is nearing their natural end. The little sage bundles inside have dried to a dark green color now. Even the blankets Legion brought the night of my engagement party are still here. On the ground, dusty and probably crawling with bugs.

Well, not bugs. Not this late in the year. The days are still warm, but the nights get cold. I'm not wearing a dress tonight like I usually do so Legion doesn't have to waste time taking my clothes off. Tonight it's loose faded jeans and a rust-colored Ashby Ranch hoodie with a jean jacket.

I draw the line at shoes though. I can't imagine comin' here in shoes. It's never been a winter place, but if I can't convince Legion to let me back into his life, I might have to rethink my footwear decisions.

I take a seat on the wooden ladder that leads up to the loft, settling my bare feet on the lowest rung, and prop my chin in my hands. Just thinkin'. Lettin' my mind wander back the way it always does in here, like the silo itself is a kind of memory palace, and every stone and splinter holds a different piece of the girl I used to be.

That first time I found this place, I was wearing a white dress. It was a Sunday, so there'd been church, and the dress was the kind my mother would've photographed from six different angles—eyelet cotton, smocked across the chest, the sort of thing that photographs like innocence and irons like a penance.

But that afternoon everyone had somewhere else to be, and the ranch was as close to empty as 47,000 acres can get, which is to say there were cowboys in the east pasture, and hands in the equipment barn, and probably someone movin' cattle somewhere I couldn't see, but not a single one of them was in charge of my afternoon.

Nobody's eyes on me. Not one lens pointed in my direction.

That was a rarity so complete it felt almost physical, like the pressure in the air had changed.

So I saddled Bucky—my fat little buckskin pony—and I took off.

I wandered and wandered, and I wasn't afraid of getting lost because every horse girl worth her boots knows that when a pony leaves the herd, they carry a constant, bone-deep itch to go home.

The barn is always north on their compass.

You cannot lose yourself on a pony's back, not really—they will always take you home, whether you ask them to or not, and so I was entirely, purely, catastrophically carefree that day.

Carefree in a way I don't think I've been since. Not once. Not in all the years that followed with their cameras and their follower counts and their carefully curated proof-of-living—none of it has ever touched what that afternoon felt like.

Just me and Bucky and 47,000 acres of nobody watchin'.

I'd found the silo by accident the way you find all the things that matter most, which is to say I wasn't lookin' for it. I'd ended up in the loft somehow, the way a child does, climbin' because the ladder was there and I was twelve years old and the view from the top of anything is always worth the effort.

I was sittin' up in the dust and the gold light, feet hangin' over the edge, and I was singin'. Ave Maria. The whole thing, slow and sure, the way Sister Catalina had taught us at chapel, because the acoustics in here do something holy to a voice—they hold it, round it out, give it back to you a little better than you offered it.

And then this beautiful blond boy walked through the door like something the song had summoned. Like Ave Maria was a kind of prayer and the silo had answered it.

I didn't stop singin'. Just kept goin'. Because it felt like the music had called him here, and to stop would be to break whatever spell had opened that door.