Page 42 of Chains and Vows

I'm so sorry to interrupt your morning, would you mind terribly helping me dress myself like I'm five years old? No. I don't ask the staff for that. I don't ask the staff for anything I can do myself, even when doing it myself looks like a rodeo queen wrestling a sail.

Once I've managed it, I go still and look in the mirror.

The dress is a thick flannel tartan in dark green and black and it falls all the way to the floor the way I like, the long sleeves ending in fitted cuffs with tiny pearl buttons marching neatly down each wrist, and the waist is pulled in tight and snatched by the corset underneath so that the whole composition reads almost architectural, almost Victorian, like someone transplanted a Scottish country house onto the high plains of Montana and I walked out of it.

I can't say I hate it. I just… cannot.

It occurs to me, standin' here with my wrists buttoned to my chin and my waist corseted into something resembling architectural intention, that I might be living out the life of a tragic heroine in a period romance novel—the kind my mother would have staged for content and called authentic.

I can't escape it. This costume. Except standin’ here now—I'm not entirely certain it still is a costume.

It might just actually, authentically, honestly… be me.

That's a disorienting thought, Savannah.

Somewhere between the staged dollhouse tea parties, and the golden-hour pony rides, and a thousand mornings exactly like this one, I became this character.

Or maybe I always was her, and the performance was just the evidence. Savannah Rose Ashby. Heiress. Western aesthetic icon. A whole person assembled from careful framing and flattering light.

I've been so busy all these years insisting I was manufactured that I never once stopped to interrogate whether that was true—or whether it was just another story I was telling, another angle I was working.

Do I have another fashion preference buried somewhere underneath all this? I search myself honestly. No. I do not. I really do love the prairie-core look, the weight of flannel, the satisfying snap of a pearl button, the way a long skirt moves against boot leather. I own jeans. I own shorts. Do I wear them with t-shirts like a normal person?

Never. Not once in my entire conscious life.

I have never stepped out of this room without a ruffle fluttering on me somewhere.

"Hmmm," I hum out loud. It's a bit shocking. Like looking in the mirror and realizing the person staring back isn't you.

Or is, in this case.

Is it too late to change?

The more important question is—do I want to change?

And for the first time, I land solidly on the side of no.

Obviously, I've been circling this topic for days now. A thought here, a thought there. But today is when it finds a home…

I am who I want to be.

Downstairs plays out much like it did yesterday, which is to say I come down later than I should and find Wyatt already at the table like he owns the room, which—technically, in a third-born sort of way—he does.

"Were you waitin’ for me?" I ask it before I've even decided to, and I'm not sure why, because Wyatt hasn't paid meaningful attention to my comings and goings in years. I'm furniture to him. Background noise.

But there's a plate in front of my chair with a silver warmer over it, heat still radiatin' off the dome, and that's not an accident. That's someone who knew I was comin'.

"Why, yes I was, Savannah. Thank you for noticing."

I almost laugh. I don't know what to do with that, honestly, so I just walk to my chair and sit, smoothing my skirt underneath me the way boarding school made automatic. "What? Are you serious?"

He looks up and winks at me. Elbows flat on the table, fork loaded with eggs like table manners were always more of a suggestion in this house than a requirement—which, given the woman who raised us, is almost cosmically revisionist of him. "I've been thinkin' about your plan."

"What plan?" I huff, and the words are out before I've made any decision to say them, which means they're the honest kind—the kind that come from the gut before the brain has had its coffee.

But even as they're leaving my mouth, the understanding is already arrivin', slow and inevitable as a front coming in off the mountains, and I know exactly what plan he means.

I still choose the lie. There's protocol to maintain. "I don't know what you're talkin' about."