Page 6 of Iron and Ivory

I gesture toward the empty dark where the taillight used to be, where there's nothin' left now but the ghost of exhaust and the silence that followed it.

"He can't just—" I stop. Start again. "I mean, what the fuck was that?"

Cash is shrugging, shaking his head, and I can see it on his face—he has absolutely no idea what just happened in there. He doesn't know I pulled that book out of the safe and laid it open in front of Legion like some kind of confession. He doesn't know what I showed him. He doesn't know what Legion said back. He doesn't know any of it, and the distance between what Cash knows and what I know feels like standing on one side of a canyon and wavin' at someone across it, pretendin' it's nothing, pretendin' the drop isn't there.

And he has no idea our mother was dying.

Dying.

I let that word sit in my chest for a second and it doesn't fit. It doesn't have anywhere to go.

How could she have kept that from us?

She didn't tell us. Not a word, not a single hint, not a tremor in her voice at dinner or a look that lasted a second too long.

I thought— God, I thought she was on some new diet when she started losin' weight. I thought that because she told me that.

Some new Mediterranean thing. I can hear her sayin' it. I can hear the particular way she made it sound practical and elegant at the same time, like something she'd read in a magazine she curated just as carefully as she curated everything else.

She used those exact words.

And I believed her.

And what the hell is wrong with me that I didn't see through it? That I stood right in front of her and took the explanation at face value, the way you accept a photograph without ever asking what happened five minutes before the shutter clicked?

My mother built a career on the art of the frame—on what you include and what you cut out of the shot—and I still stood there like a tourist in my own life, noddin' along, sayin' oh, Mediterranean, how lovely.

That's dumb, Savannah.

That's not just dumb. That's the particular kind of sad that quietly rearranges the furniture of everything you thought was true until you walk into a room and can't find anything familiar.

I didn't know her.

After thirty years of bein' her subject, her content, her most monetized asset, her daughter—I didn't know her at all.

I knew the version she held up to the light.

I knew the caption.

But apparently Legion Kane knew the whole damn album.

"Savannah?" Cash grabs me by the shoulders, and I realize I'm swayin' because his hands are the only reason I'm not meeting the ground. "Savannah, what's going on? Are you okay?"

The world is turning at an angle that it has absolutely no business turning at, and I am aware, in that distant and clinical way you become aware of things when your body has quietly decided to override your dignity, that the dirt is comin' up to greet me whether I like it or not.

Cash is staring down at me now. I'm in his arms, which means some interval of time has elapsed that I cannot account for, and his face is doing something it almost never does. Something unguarded, and raw, and genuinely frightened, and I file that away somewhere—the fact that Cash Ashby looks scared—because it feels important in a way I don't have the capacity to examine right now.

"Savannah. Can you hear me?"

I can hear him. I can hear everything.

That's the problem.

I can hear every single thing my mother never said to me, echoing around inside my chest like a voice in the silo, and apparently my body has decided that is simply too much information.

I think I just fainted.

I, Savannah Rose Ashby, have fainted in the dirt like a Victorian heroine who just received bad news about the estate.