Page 25 of Chains and Vows

Wrong question, maybe.

What does Eleanor Ashby, famous Montana photographer, label oil field debt?

I ponder this as I stand in the center of the room. The cabinets have a sort of Dewey Decimal system to them—not the actual one, obviously, but Eleanor's version of it.

It's all organized by subject.

Which… is me, mostly.

But not all of it is me. Obviously, Legion's name is all over the negative shelves. It appears she only developed the ones she cherished. The ones for the book. The rest were relegated to a life inside the tiny drawers as potential.

I have to admit, I've never really looked at her work past that.

In my mind, I was her project. Legion only became part of this understandin' of mine after the fact, when I got access to the room and the safe.

But now that I look, I see that not all the shelves have our names on them.

There are others. Cash's name. Wyatt. Colt. There's a row that says 'Staff'. Which is touching, in a way. That she immortalized the staff. Something I didn't actually know.

There's one called 'Hands' too.

And then… 'Matthias'.

It is in this moment that I realize… she has pictures of Legion's father.

I stare at that word—‘Matthias’—until my eyeballs burn.

A whole section of negatives devoted to Legion's father.

A man that, according to Legion, Eleanor was obsessed with to the point where she followed his son around for twenty-five years with a camera lens between them.

There are six boxes of slides.

Not negatives. Slides.

The difference matters.

Negatives are for storing. For protecting. For the 'someday' that might never come.

Slides are for seeing. For lookin' at over and over.

Eleanor processed these. She wanted to look at them. Regularly.

I pull the first two wooden boxes off the shelf, feeling their solid weight in my hands. My stomach twists as I carry them to the slide projector sittin’ on the table against the back wall.

I know this machine intimately. There's an identical one upstairs in her office, where I spent what felt like years of my life watchin’ Eleanor sort through images of me. My posture. My smile. My hair. The endless dissection of which frame had the right light on my cheekbones or the perfect tilt to my chin.

That one, Savannah. See how the shadow falls? That's the line we want to feature.

I never paid attention to the mechanics of the machine itself. I just absorbed its operation through osmosis, the way you learn to tie your shoes without rememberin’ being taught.

I set the boxes down and flip on the projector. The cooling fan whirs to life, familiar and mechanical. The Ashby mansion might be state-of-the-art modern in most ways, but Eleanor kept this technology deliberately vintage.

It fit the aesthetic.

I open the first box, careful not to touch the actual slide surfaces. The little cardboard frames are dated in Eleanor's perfect handwriting. The dates are all clues in their own right.

Every picture was taken before Legion was born. All within the same three-month period.