Page 41 of Chains and Vows

You don't see it yet, but the horses know.

The cattle know.

Something in the atmosphere shifts, and every living creature on 47,000 acres makes a small, involuntary decision to pay attention.

That's dumb, Savannah. She's not here.

And then I'm just mad. "Get out of my head, Mother," I tell the ceiling. "You don't live here anymore."

Without a second thought, I throw the covers back and swing my feet to the floor, because I have missed breakfast twice now and I don't like the way that feels. It sits wrong in me, like a fence post set crooked—doesn't matter if the rest of the line is true, your eye finds it every time.

And it's not the meal itself, though breakfast at the Ashby ranch has always been worth the waking, the coffee dark and proper and the eggs done right, the kitchen smelling like the kind of morning my mother would have framed and posted with a soft-focus filter and a caption about gratitude.

It's the rhythm that goes missin' when breakfast turns into brunch. The whole sequence of the day loses its footing, and then you're just driftin', reactin', showin' up late to your own life.

October weather has finally decided to show up, and that means a wardrobe change—a proper one, the kind that requires actual thought before you open the closet door.

Maxi dresses.

There is a whole season's worth of feeling in that shift. And I welcome it, I genuinely do, because summer dresses have their glory—cotton lace, short hems, the kind of lightness that photographs well in golden hour and feels like freedom when you're movin' through a field—but you can't sustain them. They require a certain kind of warmth to hold their meaning.

And you absolutely cannot pull off a maxi dress in January because the maxi dress in the snow is a disaster waitin' to happen. The hem finds the wet before you've cleared the porch steps.

It finds ice, it finds mud, it finds every dirty surface between the door and wherever you're tryin' to get to, and then you've just got cold linen clinging to your ankles and the whole elegant intention of the thing is ruined.

But October—October is exactly right for it.

Fall comes with a linen maxi in something the color of old cream or faded sage, with a corset bodice that laces up the front and an old-fashioned ruffle slip peeking out just enough from the bottom hem to catch the light when I walk, and that's not a small thing to me. That's a whole philosophy of dressing—that the best detail is the one you almost miss.

In the old days of Eleanor's glory, the seasonal wardrobe change was an affair—not a shopping trip, not a casual errand, but a ceremony with the weight of a court appointment and the logistics of a military campaign.

It came with the drive to Harmon & Sons in Miles City, which has been dressin' the Ashby men and women for over a hundred years now, and that lineage of commerce was not incidental to Eleanor. It was the entire point. She would no more buy my clothes off a rack in Billings than she'd borrow money from a banker, and the distinction between those two indignities was, in her estimation, negligible.

So twice a year, we went. Spring and fall, like the tides. Like liturgy.

A seamstress would appear—one of a small, carefully curated handful whose families had been sewing for Ashby women across generations, whose mothers had pinned Eleanor's hems and whose grandmothers had fitted Eleanor's mother before that—and the bolts of cloth were already pulled and waiting when we walked in, because Eleanor called ahead with the season's requirements. Color palette. Occasion list. Approximate proportions.

Eleanor always called ahead.

I would stand on the fitting stool in front of the triple mirror, arms out, bein' pinned with the focused, cheerful patience of someone being tailored for a portrait rather than a life, while Eleanor sat in the good chair with coffee she didn't drink, approving or rejecting each fabric with a single word. Yes. No. Heavier. The seamstress would make a note. The bolt would disappear or stay.

Wool skirts and riding clothes for the academy's school terms. Dresses for the functions already entered in Eleanor's day planner months in advance—there was no spontaneity in that calendar, no room for an event that hadn't been anticipated and dressed for appropriately.

Everything came in the muted palette of our particular class—nothing bright, nothing branded, nothing that announced itself before the name does, because the name was supposed to do all the announcing, and whatever I wore was meant to stand quietly behind it like a well-trained horse at a gate.

I never chose a single garment. Not once. Not even a button.

The wardrobe was Eleanor's control made wearable, made tactile, pressed into service against my body twice a year: you will look like an Ashby, and what an Ashby looks like is entirely my decision. She built the image from the hem up, and I was the armature she draped it over, and the camera was always waiting when she was done.

Naturally, after her passing, I didn't continue the tradition. I had no real relationship with the people at Harmon & Sons—no rapport with the seamstress, no standing in that particular ritual without Eleanor to preside over it. I was incidental to the whole affair, the way a mannequin is incidental to the dress. The ceremony existed because of her. Without her, it was just a woman in a shop in Miles City with nowhere to put her approval.

So I didn't go. Haven't gone since. Seven years now, and I've done all my own shopping, which sounds like a minor thing and is not, actually, a minor thing—it was the first sustained act of self-determination I ever performed in the domain of my own wardrobe, and I will not apologize for the fact that I feel something about it, even now.

It hasn't been disastrous. I pretty much chose the same things Eleanor would have chosen, in the same palette, the same silhouettes, the same muted insistence on quality over spectacle. Only cheaper, obviously. Nothing custom-made. Nothing that requires a woman with a tape measure and a reverent expression and Eleanor sitting in that chair issuing verdicts like a small elegant judge. I order almost everything online now. Don't even try it on first.

A laugh escapes me as I pull the lace tight on the corset bodice, my shoulders burnin' with the effort of it, arms wrenched back at an angle that is neither graceful nor dignified, and I think—not for the first time—that there is a particular cruelty in garments designed to be put on by two people when you are down to one.

Obviously I could ask one of the maids. Structurally speaking, that is the solution. But I'd rather dislocate something.