CHAPTER 4 – SAWYER
Sawyer had three very valid reasons for making another visit to the cottage currently inhabited by one Nellie Fuller.
The reasons were as follows: there was a storm forecasted for next week so it was only reasonable to install a backup generator for emergencies, the southern access track had reportedly developed a drainage issue requiring on-site assessment, and Nellie had emailed late last night with a question about the survey permit boundary markers.
Martha received all three in sequence over the phone at seven forty-one in the morning. “I’ll have the car ready at nine.”
“Eight thirty.”
“Eight thirty.”
The drive took forty-five minutes. Sawyer spent the first twenty on a call with general counsel about a data residency issue in the EU division, the next eight reviewing a supplier contract that had arrived overnight with three clauses she found vaguely offensive, and the remaining seventeen pretending to herself that she wasn’t mentally calculating which access track would take her within viewing distance of the cottage without passing directly in front of it.
She took the southern track.
The forest at mid-morning was different from the forest at six a.m. The light came through in long, shifting angles, moving with the wind, and the bird noises were—she adjusted her assessment as she stepped out of the car—significant.
Considerable. Sawyer begrudgingly categorized it as ambient, walking the access track with both hands in her coat pockets and the focused stride of someone there to look at drainage.
She found the drainage. The erosion on the downhill curve was documented and messaged to the site manager in under four minutes.
It was an entirely defensible reason to be standing in a forest at nine in the morning instead of at her desk where she had, among other things, Gina’s construction timeline update waiting.
She was pocketing her phone when she heard it—a low hum from somewhere in the undergrowth, tuneless and unselfconscious, followed by a pause and then a sound she could only describe as a murmur of private approval.
Then: “Oh, hello.”
Nellie Fuller was some thirty feet to her left, crouched at the base of a moss-covered log at the tree line, one knee pressed into the ground, a field notebook open flat across her thigh.
She had on a rain jacket that looked like it had seen better days.
Her pack was open beside her, seemingly organized with a precision that didn’t match a single other thing about her physical presentation, and she was examining the underside of a piece of bark with a focus so consuming she had not heard Sawyer’s car or her footsteps.
Sawyer weighed two options: announce herself or get back in the car.
“Ms. Fuller. Drainage issue?”
“Generator, actually.”
“Generator’s on the other side of the property.”
Sawyer sighed. “I was in the area.”
“Right.” Nellie turned back to the bark and lifted it with two careful fingers. “Come look at this, if you want.”
Sawyer had not moved toward the undergrowth with any intention of crouching in it, and she was not going to do so now.
She walked over anyway with the deliberate pace of someone conducting an inspection rather than responding to an invitation.
Stopping just behind Nellie’s shoulder, she looked down at the underside of the bark, which was carpeted in something intricate and faintly luminous—pale threads woven through darker patches, tiny pale cups clustered at the edge.
“Four sporocarp species,” Nellie said, without looking up, writing something in the notebook.
“On one log surface. The previous survey recorded one. The initial assessment documented the canopy with reasonable thoroughness and then, from what I can reconstruct, appears to have looked at the ground layer for approximately twenty minutes and called it complete.” She set the bark back carefully. “No offense to your survey team.”
“Some taken on their behalf.”
Nellie glanced up at that. Her face did something strange—the precursor to a smile rather than the smile itself, there and almost gone. It left Sawyer confoundingly a little disappointed.
“The ground layer is where the mycorrhizal network lives. That network is where the carbon sequestration actually happens, where the moisture retention is regulated—where the trees talk, to put it in terms that make people listen.” She wrote something else in the notebook.
“The survey submitted to the county documented three species of protected flora. I’ve covered less than a fifth of the acreage, and I’m currently at nine.
Possibly eleven. So, to the question you asked me the other day—”
“It was rhetorical.”
“—about what I expect to find in sixty days that a professional survey team didn’t find in six months.
” Nellie looked up. In the filtered mid-morning light, her eyes were the amber-green of shallow water over clean gravel.
“The answer is approximately everything I suspect your team was paid not to notice.”
The word paid was precise and delivered without heat, which was the part that made it difficult to answer.
Sawyer fought to keep hold of her temper. “Forgive me for putting a little more faith in a team of professionals than in you. Your credibility hinges on a master’s degree from a program you haven’t used in any professional capacity since graduating.”
“I’ve contributed to four peer-reviewed publications.”
“As an activist who chains herself to trees for a livestream audience.”
“As a field researcher,” Nellie snapped. “The tree chaining is, technically, a hobby. A very effective hobby.”
“Three successful campaigns,” Sawyer returned. “Against two failures, if we’re being rigorous about effectiveness.”
Nellie tilted her head. “Your research team is thorough.”
“That’s what I pay them for.”
“Then they’ll have told you that neither failure was a failure of the ecological case.
One was a vote pulled to close the session before we had sufficient leverage.
The other—the Redwood Creek survey—lost funding after a state budget cut we had no mechanism to prevent.
” She closed the notebook. “The science held up in both instances. The trees are still standing.” Sadness turned down the corners of Nellie’s full lips this time. “Most of them.”
The qualifier occupied the silence between them for a moment.
“Regardless of how effective you think you are, you’re on my land right now,” Sawyer said finally. “Telling me my surveyors were bought.”
“I said they were paid. There’s nuance there.
” Nellie pulled the pack straps level and stood, brushing detritus from her knee.
“You offered me sixty days in front of nearly twenty thousand people because it was the correct tactical move in the moment. I accepted because it was mine. We both know exactly what this is.” Her expression was direct and simple, stripped of performance.
“So, I’ll keep finding what your team missed, and you can keep pretending to check on generators, and in fifty-seven days we’ll know which one of us was right about what this land actually contains. ”
“I know what this land contains,” Sawyer said. “The appraisal was very clear.”
Nellie laughed.
It was the most disarming thing Sawyer had experienced in years, and she was furious about that.
“Fifty-seven days,” she repeated.
“Fifty-seven days.” Nellie adjusted her headlamp with one distracted push, which did nothing to correct its position. “The offer stands, by the way, if you ever want to actually walk the land. The eastern slope above the drainage is worth seeing. You’re already dressed for it. Mostly.”
Her eyes dropped to Sawyer’s boots—the new ones, bought two days ago, which were functional and waterproof and entirely undeserving of any comment—and that almost-smile returned, quick as a signal light, gone just as fast. Then she turned and pushed through the ferns, the sound of her tuneless hum already moving away through the trees.
Sawyer stood on the access track.
For several minutes all she could focus on was breathing deeply.
Then she walked back to the car.
She was at her desk by two-fifteen. By six o’clock she had cleared the EU matter, drafted two board correspondence items, moved the vendor negotiation to the end of the week, and reviewed a partnership proposal from the infrastructure team that she approved with three minor amendments.
A productive afternoon by any documentable measure.
The kind of afternoon that justified the morning, rebalanced the ledger, and required no further examination.
At six-thirty, she opened Gina’s construction timeline update—red-flagged in her inbox since Monday, prioritized for review. She read the executive summary. Then she read the first paragraph of the foundation assessment section.
At seven-fifteen, she noticed she had been looking at the same paragraph for nearly forty minutes.
Sawyer sat back slowly.
The paragraph had not changed. Gina’s timeline, the flagged notes on the northern sector, the foundation assessment—all of it was there on the screen exactly as it had been.
Her eyes had been on it, and she could report to any interested party that the paragraph’s first sentence concerned concrete pour scheduling.
She could not have told you what the second sentence said if her company had depended on it.
What she had been thinking about—without deciding to, without noticing until this moment that she was doing it continuously—was that laugh.
The specific, unarchivable quality of it.
The way it had no edge and no performance and no relationship whatsoever to what Sawyer Alburn’s presence in a room usually produced.
The fact that it had come from three feet away in a forest clearing and somehow occupied more space than the Douglas firs, and that three hours later it was sitting in the middle of Gina’s construction timeline like it lived there and had no intention of relocating.
Sawyer stared at this fact for a long moment.
Then she looked back at the report.
Then she closed it again.