Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 40966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
Legion Kane. Maybe three years old.
I turn the page with care. The progression is familiar—close-ups of those eyes, narrowed against prairie sun. A series of candids where he doesn't know he was being watched.
Climbing fences, throwing rocks at nothing, sleeping under a tree with his arm flung over his face.
The pages whisper as I turn them. Eleanor arranged these photos by some internal logic only she understood. Mostly age, but there’s several series that span decades, and then the progression will loop back on itself and seemingly start over.
Here's Legion at seven, his school photo taken from an angle no school photographer would choose—slightly below, catching the light in his lashes, making him look celestial and feral all at once.
Then Legion at nine, ten, eleven—leaning against fences, looking outward, always outward, as if searching for hole in a fence he can’t ever escape. His features sharpening with each passing year, baby softness giving way to angles that now cut like glass.
Me and Legion, fourteen and sixteen. She knew. She'd found us… somehow. Her camera capturing moments we thought were ours alone. Kisses stolen behind hay bales. Our bodies stretched beneath stars. My head on his chest, his hand in my hair.
She never said a word. Never confronted me. Just... documented.
My fingers tremble slightly as I turn to the next section. After I left for college when I was eighteen and he was twenty. After I stopped meetin’ him at the silo.
Four years of silence between us while I played the part of perfect college equestrian at Emory & Henry—good lighting, good posture, just enough ribbons to keep my mother’s social timeline humming along.
Four years.
Four missing years where I had no contact with him at all. It nearly killed me, but were in our we-can’t-do-this-anymore era and I was determined to…
To what, Savannah? Prove that you could live without him?
What a waste of time.
Anyway, it was during these missing years that the photos changed from candid shots to composed, intentional, and intimate portraits.
Intimate. I hate that word.
Legion is now in Mother's Drybone studio. Professional lighting catching the planes of his face and the stretch of his shoulders. The ink that started appearing when he was sixteen grows as I turn pages. The battle on his chest, the conquering of demons on his back go from being an image to being a composition.
Each photo reveals more than the last.
Shirt discarded in this one. Jeans riding low in the next. In some, there's nothing but shadow preserving his dignity.
She never photographed his dick, but she got his ass. Many times. All the photos are black and white. Artistic and beautiful.
And in every single one, his eyes hold the same hollow sadness.
Did she pay him? Is that why he did this? Was it money?
I've studied these pages for years and still don't know.
When I reach the last photo, I hold my breath. I always do.
None of the photos are dated, but this one is. It's not her handwriting, either. It's his.
Six months before Eleanor died, she and Legion were in an Ashby truck together. They were on a road, it's summer. Not sure which highway, though I've searched them all over the past seven years, trying to figure it out.
The windows are down. Hair blowin’ all over the place. They're taking a couple's selfie as Legion drives across the sun-drenched badlands.
They are both smilin’. Mother looks... happy. Forty-eight years old and radiant beside him.
I pause.
I reflect.
I accept.
And then I close the book, resting my palm on its cover.
This book isn't motherly.
It isn't innocent.
It isn't okay.
It was never shared. Never monetized. Never digitized.
The one secret Eleanor Ashby never spun into gold was Legion Kane.
The one child she photographed relentlessly and didn't use to make money.
Him.
Not me.
Him.
To the world, she was the mother who made me a brand.
In private, she was the woman who collected a boy like butterfly wings pinned to velvet.
I have questions I will never get answered.
Because only two people know what this book truly is and one of them is dead. I will never ask Legion about this book. Ever. Some secrets should stay buried, even as they haunt us.
I get up, slip the Book of Legion back into the safe, and lock away the secrets that feel too heavy to carry upstairs.
My fingers linger on the dial before I turn away and then the elevator hums as it returns me to my closet, to my life, to the performance.
By afternoon, I'm in the outdoor arena, my heels and lower legs pressing the hidden buttons on Cassia's warm body that will tell her to yield, or shoulder in, or half-pass as we practice the only thing I got out of college—dressage skills.
Meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but very impressive when dropped into an Instagram reel with trending music.
That’s not why I do it, though I do share videos like that on occasion.