Page 55 of Hell and Halos

The dreams of teenagers who had everything to say to each other and absolutely nothing to show the world for it.

But it's real now.

At the beginnings of real.

And this is where we spend Christmas Eve.

Not at the ranch with its twelve-foot Fraser fir flown in from North Carolina and its color-coordinated ornaments that my mother selected with the same precision she applied to aperture settings.

Not in the great room with the stone fireplace and the antler chandelier castin' warm light across surfaces that were always staged, always ready for the next photo, the next post, the next performance of a life that looked like love from the outside.

Here. In the silo.

With our first real Christmas tree.

It's a scraggly thing—barely five feet tall, lopsided in a way that makes it lean like it's listenin' for somethin', and we cut it down together about half a mile from here where the tree line thins out and the junipers give way to a few brave pines that have no business growin' in soil this dry.

Legion carried it over his shoulder and I walked beside him and neither of us said a word about how small it was, because small isn't the same thing as insufficient. Small is just honest. Small is just the right size for a cylinder that used to hold grain and now holds us.

There wasn't time for a proper shopping trip so we did it all online. Every bit of it. Sat together on the platform with my laptop balanced between us, scrollin' through pages of ornaments, and tinsel, and little string lights, addin' things to the cart the way other people add items to a registry. Deliberate. Tender, almost.

And tonight, we will open all those little boxes together, and unwrap each one, and hang them on the tree, and I already know it's gonna be the most beautiful thing I've ever decorated, because nothing about it is fake or curated and not a single moment of it will be captured for socials.

And after all that's done, when there's nothin' around us but the thing we built together, we finish what we started…

EPILOGUE

I marry Savannah Rose Ashby standin' on a snow-covered hill at the silo on Christmas Eve in front of no one but God, and the stars, and the night, and it's more than enough.

Even though Savannah is free and I am respectable, this is the only way it ends for us. Standin' in the dark. No witnesses but the sky. No officiant but the dirt under our boots and the weight of every fuckin' year that tried to kill this thing between us and couldn't.

This is the only altar that means a goddamn thing.

There will be a piece of paper. One day. I know that.

There will be an engagement party with people who smile at us and whisper behind their hands.

There will be a weddin' with flowers, and chairs lined up in rows, and someone cryin' in the back because they had too much champagne.

There will be a honeymoon, and a crowd, and photographs, and guests who don't know shit about what it cost to stand next to each other in the light.

There must be one. For the sake of our child. For the world that demands its receipts, and its proof, and its little stamped permission slip that says yes, these two people are allowed to belong to each other now.

But there's no meanin' in that paper. None.

It's a contract with the state. A handshake with a bureaucracy that doesn't give a fuck whether your chest cracks open every time she walks into a room. It's ink on a line, filed in a drawer, forgotten by the clerk before lunch.

This promise right here under the sky is the only one that matters.

This is the one that counts.

Savannah wears a prairie dress. Not white, but yellow.

I said to her, "Yellow?" And she said back to me, "What's wrong with yellow?" And I replied, "Well, don't ya all like white for this occasion?" And she said, "Who is this 'ya all' you're referrin' to?"

So I said, "You're gonna look hot as fuck in winter yellow, baby. I can't wait."

Which was the right answer from the get-go and I should've started there.