Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Some new Mediterranean thing. I can hear her sayin' it. I can hear the particular way she made it sound practical and elegant at the same time, like something she'd read in a magazine she curated just as carefully as she curated everything else.
She used those exact words.
And I believed her.
And what the hell is wrong with me that I didn't see through it? That I stood right in front of her and took the explanation at face value, the way you accept a photograph without ever asking what happened five minutes before the shutter clicked?
My mother built a career on the art of the frame—on what you include and what you cut out of the shot—and I still stood there like a tourist in my own life, noddin' along, sayin' oh, Mediterranean, how lovely.
That's dumb, Savannah.
That's not just dumb. That's the particular kind of sad that quietly rearranges the furniture of everything you thought was true until you walk into a room and can't find anything familiar.
I didn't know her.
After thirty years of bein' her subject, her content, her most monetized asset, her daughter—I didn't know her at all.
I knew the version she held up to the light.
I knew the caption.
But apparently Legion Kane knew the whole damn album.
"Savannah?" Cash grabs me by the shoulders, and I realize I'm swayin' because his hands are the only reason I'm not meeting the ground. "Savannah, what's going on? Are you okay?"
The world is turning at an angle that it has absolutely no business turning at, and I am aware, in that distant and clinical way you become aware of things when your body has quietly decided to override your dignity, that the dirt is comin' up to greet me whether I like it or not.
Cash is staring down at me now. I'm in his arms, which means some interval of time has elapsed that I cannot account for, and his face is doing something it almost never does. Something unguarded, and raw, and genuinely frightened, and I file that away somewhere—the fact that Cash Ashby looks scared—because it feels important in a way I don't have the capacity to examine right now.
"Savannah. Can you hear me?"
I can hear him. I can hear everything.
That's the problem.
I can hear every single thing my mother never said to me, echoing around inside my chest like a voice in the silo, and apparently my body has decided that is simply too much information.
I think I just fainted.
I, Savannah Rose Ashby, have fainted in the dirt like a Victorian heroine who just received bad news about the estate.
It is the most profoundly, absurdly, catastrophically stupid thing I have ever done.
Cash doesn't ask if I want to be carried. He just does it. His arms are iron under my knees and behind my back, and I am horizontal and helpless and bein' moved like furniture repositioned before a shoot, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it because my legs have apparently filed for independent governance and the vote did not go my way.
He's barking orders before we even clear the doorway. I can hear the house manager's shoes on the flagstone, quick and purposeful, and the maids scattering into useful configurations the way they always do when Cash takes command of a room, because Cash has that quality—the quality of a man who expects the world to rearrange itself around his intentions, and the world, to its credit, generally obliges.
I am deposited onto the great room sofa with more gentleness than I deserve.
"Put your feet up," Cash says, and it is not a suggestion.
Then there are hands everywhere—not his, other hands—someone pressing a glass of water against my palm, someone else arranging a cool cloth across my forehead with the kind of theatrical efficiency that suggests this household has a protocol for exactly this sort of emergency.
Which, knowing my mother, it probably does.
She'd have staged it first. Checked the light.
It is, without question, the most ridiculous tableau I have ever been part of, and I have been photographed on horseback at sunrise in a custom Chanel field jacket for a brand partnership, so my threshold for absurdity is not low.
I am the invalid on the fainting couch.
I am the delicate creature requiring smelling salts and a devoted household staff.
I am every soft-spined heroine in every overwrought film I have ever watched with my eyes half-rolled, and the fact that I am living it right now, in my own home, is so cosmically humiliating that I briefly consider whether unconsciousness might actually be preferable to this.
It is not. But I consider it.
Cash begins snapping his fingers and the room empties the way rooms do when the person asking isn't actually asking.
The pocket doors slide closed on their brass track with a sound so polished and final it belongs in a different kind of house entirely.