Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 40966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
We already knew each other, sorta. Same town. Same church, sometimes. But she went to private school a few towns over, only home on weekends. There wasn't a moment in my life when Savannah Ashby wasn't in it.
But it was in a distant way.
Nothing somethin’ this up close and personal. That meetin’ right there was the first time we were ever alone together. The first time we ever talked.
She sang a little more. All church songs. All songs I knew, if only by osmosis.
And I sat on the lower rungs of the ladder, elbows on my knees, sweaty from my ride explorin’. She stayed on the edge of the platform, swinging her feet and twirling a piece of hay between her fingers like it held answers.
We talked about siblings. My new one upcomin’ and her older brothers. She had three—of course, I knew this. Everyone knows the Ashby brothers. Cash, Wyatt, and Colt in descending order.
We talked about her being watched by her mother’s camera lens. I understood—fuckin Eleanor watched me too. But I didn’t say nothin’ about that to Savannah. I could relate though, that was the important part.
We talked about growin’ up in a town where everyone knew your name.
Hers, and how she would elevate it.
Mine, and how I was gonna ruin it.
I knew Eleanor much better than I knew Savannah back then. Eleanor Ashby was a very famous photographer and the Little Ashby Princess was the subject of every single published photo.
Every single bit of Savannah’s life was online. I didn’t look at it back then. I didn’t have a phone to check socials. Didn’t want a phone to check socials. Still don’t have any fuckin’ socials.
But other kids did. So I’d seen my share of those photos.
Eleanor didn’t put me online. She said I was somethin’ else. Photogenic. The most beautiful child she'd ever seen, is what she really told me—hundreds of times.
But Legion Kane was a story nobody really wanted to hear about.
I was too poor to put on a magazine cover.
It was never my face online—just Savannah's.
Every day, three, four, five, six times a day Eleanor posted a picture or two of her perfect little princess.
She took pictures of me everywhere as well. Riding my bike, running around the county fair, coming out of school. There isn't a place within fifty miles of Drybone, Montana that Eleanor Ashby didn't find me and take a fuckin’ picture.
Even came to the trailer once. On a pretense, of course. My mama never knew about the photos. Deacon wasn't my daddy, so whether he knew or not, no one cared.
So I knew the Ashbys the way other folks around here know them—from afar.
But also, from the other end of Eleanor's camera lens.
And I knew Savannah in that first way as well.
But on this day, I knew her in a different way.
I had her all to myself that day.
And that's where it all started.
Innocently, of course. It would be a year before we held hands. Two before I kissed her. And three years, almost to the day, before we made it all official by losing our virginity together. I was seventeen, she was fifteen, and it was perfect.
We never dated.
Nah. Just hookups.
That's all I was to them—the Ashbys. Something to be seen through a lens. Something to be held at a distance.
The truck hits a pothole, jolting me back to the here and now. The memory fades, but the ache doesn't.
I stare out the window, watching Montana blur past. I was a different person back then. We both were. Before the ink on my skin, before the blood on my hands, before prison walls and engagement rings.
But the relationship stuck, that’s for sure.
The next week after that first meetin’, I gave Savannah a pocketknife with my initials scratched off. She let me brush her pony. We didn't tell anyone. We didn't have to.
We just kept meeting—no lies, no pressure. No one taking pictures.
Just two kids sitting in a silo where the silence wasn't empty, it was safe.
Now, nothing's safe.
Not the memories or my future.
Earl drops me at the crossroads with a friendly honk, dust billowing behind his eighteen wheels as he pulls away. I tip an imaginary hat at his taillights and continue my walk.
The sun's still high enough to burn, but I can see the shade of the cottonwoods ahead where the old riverbed cuts between Kane scrub and Ashby wealth. I turn toward it like a man following his religion.
Two miles to my trailer. Two miles of memory and dust.
The dry riverbed is a wound in the earth that only bleeds water three months a year. Spring makes it something else entirely—rushing snowmelt carving through soft banks, wildflowers nodding heavy on the edges. Water so cold it burns your feet when you wade in. Used to dare Destiny to cross it during the flood season, watching her balance on slippery rocks while I pretended not to be ready to dive in after her.