Page 8 of Iron and Ivory

He stayed. And he's been holdin' things together with nothing but calloused hands and quiet resolve for years now, with absolutely no help from me, or Wyatt, or Colt.

His careless, distracted, self-involved siblings who don't go to cattle auctions because they couldn't pick a Wagyu-Angus hybrid out of a lineup if their inheritance depended on it. Don't care to learn, either. Don't care that someone has to.

And I'm ramblin', even inside my own head, and the point is, I want him to understand. I want Cash to understand the catastrophe that just unfolded out at Badlands.

The layers of it, the way it isn't just blood, and bodies, and federal implications but is also somehow, ironically, about me and a leather-bound book, and a dead woman's obsession, and seventeen years of a secret so sacred I built a whole life on top of it to keep it buried.

But the thought of findin' the correct words—the right words, the precise and adequate words—for how much the earth just shifted beneath our feet is… impossible.

If telepathy were a real and available thing, I am absolutely certain this moment would go considerably better for everyone involved.

But it's not so…

I just…

Cry.

Cash lets me cry.

He takes himself over to the wingback leather chair by the dark window and sits down heavy, one ankle propped up on one knee, the way men do when they're trying to look unbothered and failing just slightly.

My eyes follow him across the room, watchin' him, but he's not looking at me. He's staring at the cold fireplace. The massive stone thing that climbs twenty feet up to the beamed ceiling, hand-hewn and dark with years of smoke and silence, the kind of fireplace that looks like it was built to outlast everyone who ever stood in front of it.

His foot jiggles a little.

My tears ride down my cheeks slow and deliberate, the way grief moves when it's finally stopped pretending it's something else, and I let them, because this is a pity party and I haven't thrown one of those ever—not even once—mostly out of this deep-trained fear that Eleanor would materialize from somewhere with her Nikon and her eye for the golden ratio and catch me mid-sob, beautiful in my ruin, caption already composed: Even a princess has a bad day. #Authentic #RanchLife #Blessed.

She would have made it gorgeous. That's the worst part.

But I need this pity party. I need it the way you need the last word in an argument you already lost—desperately, uselessly, with your whole chest. And since Eleanor isn't here to stage it and charge brands for the placement, I'm gonna throw it exactly the way I want.

I need it to come with expensive decorations—orchids and trailing ivy and those towering candelabras that drip wax like they're mournin' something too—and a massive gift table stacked floor to ceiling with every apology I was never offered, and the kind of luxe grab bags that guests take home heavy and feel vaguely guilty about.

It needs to be catered. Silver service, white-gloved, seven-tier cake made entirely of tears and regrets, each layer a different year I spent performin' instead of livin', frosted with the quiet devastation of a woman who always knew, somewhere beneath the Instagram grid and the boarding school posture, that this moment was comin'.

Because my entire life just imploded, and it did it quietly, the way the best catastrophes always do—not with a bang but with a slow, certain unraveling, like a hem pulled loose on a garment you paid too much for and loved too long.

I told Instagram about Legion.

Not specifically. I didn't post his name in a caption, or tag his location, or compose some devastatingly beautiful carousel of truth with a soft-focus first slide and a hard reveal.

I'm not my mother.

But I said enough, and I know how this town works, and in a couple of days his outlaw face is gonna be on every TV screen and every online news channel from here to Billings, and there's gonna be a straight, unambiguous, impossible-to-deny line drawn from him to me, and everyone is gonna follow it all the way back to my front door.

That line is gonna be short. It is gonna be bright. It is gonna be the kind of thing that gets screenshotted, and stitched, and turned into content by people who don't know either of us at all.

And that's not even what's bothering me.

Like, at all.

What's bothering me is that we didn't get our chance.

We never got our chance.

Not a real one. Not the kind that gets to breathe and take its time and exist somewhere outside a grain silo, and three years of silence, and everything his life is and everything mine is supposed to be.

And now we never will.