Page 26 of Chains and Vows

Three months.

It was enough, I guess. For my mother to fall in love with a man so hard, she'd dedicate her personal time to immortalizing his son.

I lift the top of the carousel, load the first tray with slides, and lower it onto the spindle. The machine accepts it with a satisfying click.

My finger hovers over the forward button, then I press it, and light floods the wall.

Then, an image.

A young man in his twenties astride a massive Harley chopper. Not like Legion's, but something older, more raw. The handlebars stretch up high like antlers, and the man leans back against the sissy bar with casual confidence, cigarette dangling from lips that are unmistakably Legion's.

Except they're not.

This is Matthias Kane. Legion's father.

The resemblance is so striking it makes my hands shake. Same jawline. Same shoulders. Same way of holding himself like he's both part of the world and somehow outside it. The eyes are identical—that particular blue that changes with the light. In this image, they're summer-sky clear against tanned skin and wind-blown blond hair.

I press the button again.

Matthias leaning against a weathered fence post, squinting into sunlight. His cut is different from Legion's. The patches are unfamiliar, but the stance is pure Legion. The way he holds his cigarette. The set of his shoulders.

Matthias working on an old truck, grease-stained hands that could be Legion's if not for the difference in tattoos. His are sparse compared to Legion's tapestry of war—just a few scattered pieces. A snake. A skull. Something that might be a Bible verse running along his forearm.

And then—my breath stops entirely.

Eleanor.

My mother.

She's sitting sideways on Matthias's bike, wearing a long denim skirt, cowboy boots, and a white cotton blouse. Her hair falls in loose waves past her shoulders, and she's laughing—really laughing, head thrown back, nothing staged or composed about it.

She looks exactly like me.

Or rather, I look exactly like her.

The outfit she's wearing—it's the prototype for everything I've worn my entire life. The prairie dresses. The boots. The careful balance of feminine and frontier. I always thought she dressed me that way because it played well for the camera, for the brand she created.

But she didn't invent that aesthetic for me.

She was already living it.

With him.

I press forward again and again, moving through a silent film of two people falling into something that looks an awful lot like love.

Eleanor and Matthias at a bonfire.

Riding double on his bike.

Her photographing him against Montana sunsets.

Him lifting her onto the hood of a pickup truck.

Sitting together at what looks like a small-town rodeo.

In every frame, Eleanor looks softer than I ever saw her. Less controlled. Happy in a way that seems almost foreign on her face, like seeing someone you know speaking a language you didn't know they could speak.

And in every frame, my heart fractures a little more, seeing Legion's face on a man who died before his son could meet him. Seeing my own features reflected in a younger, freer version of the woman who programmed my every movement.