Page 9 of Iron and Ivory

And I'm gonna lean into this Victorian lady thing so hard it becomes my whole personality, and I'm gonna be the kind of woman who fills her calendar with galas, and board meetings, and philanthropic luncheons where everyone is polite and no one is real, and I'm gonna collect charities like a woman who has never once been touched by the jagged edge of anything true, and the worst part—the part that makes my chest go tight in a way I can't breathe around—is that it's not even my fault.

My life has been staged since the day I was born and I accepted that the way you accept weather, the way you accept the particular slant of light in late October, which is to say: completely, and without ever once bein' asked.

And now… that's over.

This is real.

And reality is… ugly.

"We have a problem," Cash says.

His voice pulls me clean out of the gorgeous, self-indulgent pity party I've been runnin' in my head. I blink. I breathe. I come back to the room.

"What?"

Which is the dumbest answer that has ever left my mouth, and that is truly sayin' something, Savannah. Because of course we have a problem. We have a whole herd of them actually, each one with its own set of hooves and its own way of trampling me flat. I just wasn't sure which one Cash had decided to lead through the door first.

"Marcus."

One word. Just the one. And it lands so far outside of anything I've been bracing for that I actually go still. Because Marcus belongs to a different compartment of my life entirely, a different color-coded, carefully curated, very publicly photographed compartment, and dragging his name into this room feels like a category error I don't have the bandwidth to sort out.

"What?" I say again.

Who says dumb never strikes the same place twice.

Cash finally looks at me, and even with that Stetson pulled low the way he always wears it—indoors, outdoors, at a funeral, at a fistfight, it genuinely does not matter—I can feel the weight of his eyes findin' mine anyway. He has that unnerving cowboy ability to look straight through a person even when you can barely see his face.

And you know what's funny about my brother? What's genuinely, achingly funny in the way that things are only funny when they're also a little bit devastating?

He's the real thing. Every single inch of him. The boots are broken in because he works in them, not because some stylist distressed them in a Venice Beach studio and charged four hundred dollars for the privilege.

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.