CHAPTER 6 – SAWYER
The budget report had ninety-three pages. Sawyer was on page forty-one, which was the section on infrastructure depreciation schedules, which was not—objectively, by any reasonable measure—less interesting than a generator installation confirmation. And yet…
Zero percent. She rolled her eyes. Zero percent fuel was, technically, a generator. It was also, technically, a very expensive metal box. She flagged the email and returned to page forty-one.
The words blurred together as Sawyer’s mind wandered far from anything in the realm of budget reports.
She was not, she told herself, concerned about Nellie Fuller specifically.
She was concerned about liability. There was a legally binding access agreement.
There was a person on her property under the terms of that agreement, and if that person experienced some kind of wilderness-related misfortune—flood, fallen tree, storm damage, whatever inconveniences the wilderness saw fit to manufacture—Alburn Systems was the responsible party.
She Googled ‘what kind of fuel do backup generators use.’
Twenty minutes later, she had fourteen browser tabs open across three overlapping categories: diesel vs.
propane, portable generator capacity ratings, and, inexplicably, a forum thread titled How much fuel do I need for a 3-day storm emergency (rural, single occupancy)?
The forum consensus was ten gallons as a minimum.
She closed all the tabs, opened a new one, and found a fuel supplier with same-day delivery windows.
Same-day delivery required a four-hour lead time. It was already seven-fifteen.
At seven-seventeen, Sawyer drove to a gas station and bought ten gallons of diesel in two five-gallon containers, which she then loaded single-handedly into the trunk of her car.
Huffing, slightly sweaty, and more-than-slightly questioning her own sanity, she climbed back behind the wheel. Then she got back onto the highway.
It was past eight when she pulled down the access road, which she’d been on often enough now that she no longer required the GPS.
This did not feel like a milestone. The containers shifted against each other in the trunk as the road dipped, producing a loud sloshing sound she had chosen not to find alarming on the drive up and was finding increasingly hard to dismiss now that she had nothing else to focus on.
She parked twenty feet from the cottage and turned the engine off.
Dropping her head back against the leather headrest, Sawyer sat with her hands in her lap and applied herself to the question of why she had not, at any of the numerous reasonable junctures between receiving that email and this moment, simply sent someone else.
She could not produce a satisfactory answer.
All that was left to do was simply get out of the car.
She was not-so-gracefully hauling the containers out of her trunk when the cottage door opened.
Sawyer straightened. Nellie stood in the doorframe, backlit and slightly steam-blurred from whatever was happening on the stove behind her—Sawyer could smell it from ten feet out, something warm and earthy, heavy with cumin—and she looked at Sawyer, then at the fuel containers, then at Sawyer again.
“Hi,” Nellie said.
“Generator needed fuel,” Sawyer responded curtly, same as she would across a conference table. “Storm forecast for next week.”
“Yeah, I know.” Nellie leaned against the doorframe. “I was going to get fuel on my next supply run.”
“I was in the area.”
Nellie’s expression remained almost entirely neutral. “You want to come in?”
Sawyer intended to say no. She had prepared no.
No was the correct answer—efficient, professional, requiring no explanation, leaving her on the access track and back in her car in under two minutes.
She had ten of those minutes banked against her original timeline, which had been: deliver fuel, drive directly back to the city, be in bed by nine-thirty.
She had not had a full night of sleep in eight days.
“Briefly, I suppose,” she heard herself say, instead.
The kitchen smelled like lentils and something green she couldn’t immediately identify.
The table had field notebooks stacked at one end, alongside a laptop, a mug, and a species reference guide open to a page on ferns.
Nellie moved back to the stove and stirred silently, like people appeared in her kitchen after dark all the time and she had adjusted her expectations accordingly.
“Sit down,” she said, not looking up. “Soup’ll be ready in two minutes.”
Sawyer sat. The chair was wooden and slightly uneven on the flagstone floor, and the table’s surface had a ring from a mug that long predated Nellie’s occupancy by the look of it.
She put both hands on it and noted, as a factual matter, that she had not sat at a kitchen table in—she tried to think how long.
The company had a dining room. She’d used it for three catered working dinners this year. That was not quite the same thing.
“You don’t have to—” she started.
“I made too much.” Nellie ladled without looking up. “I always make too much.”
She set a bowl down in front of Sawyer. Thick, red-brown, fragrant. A spoon materialized from some drawer Nellie opened and closed in one fluid motion.
“Thank you,” she said, stiffly, like the words were in a language she’d studied and not quite mastered.
“Salt’s there.” Nellie dropped into the chair across from her with her own bowl and reached for one of the notebooks. “How was your drive?”
“Fine.” Sawyer picked up the spoon. “The southern access track has a rut developing between the second and third drainage markers. I noted it on my last visit. It’s progressed.”
Nellie looked up from the notebook briefly. “That’s the runoff from the slope above. The soil structure up there doesn’t drain laterally. You know, everything moves downhill. I can write up what I found if you want to pass it to your grounds team.”
“That would be useful.”
They ate. Sawyer was aware that eating soup across a table from Nellie Fuller in a cottage kitchen at eight-thirty at night was not a scenario that had appeared in any version of her professional calendar, and she was also aware—and this awareness arrived with the particular quality of an irritant she couldn’t locate and therefore couldn’t remove—that she was entirely comfortable. Unreasonably so.
She reached for something to say and found, to her considerable dismay, that several things were available.
“The county board postponed the agenda review.” She’d meant to lead with that once, three days ago, in an email but hadn’t. “The chair cited scheduling conflicts. It buys you an additional nine days.”
Nellie’s spoon stopped moving. “Hm.” She went back to the soup. “Thank you for telling me.”
Sawyer could have stopped there. The professional function of the disclosure had been served. She picked up her spoon again, but instead of taking another bite, she said, “You know, Gina’s timeline was already tight before the board postponement. The delay is…not nothing, for us.”
“I know.” Nellie nodded. “I saw the original project proposal. The phasing structure was aggressive.”
“Gina builds aggressive timelines.”
“Does that work for you usually?”
Sawyer considered this with more genuine attention than she’d expected to give it. “When the variables hold. Gina assumes variables hold.” She set the spoon down again. “She’s usually right. Usually.”
Nellie’s eyes came up. “But not always.”
“No.” She reached for her water glass, which Nellie had set out without being asked—not a mug like she’d filled for herself, which felt like a considered choice. “Not always.”
“But I assume that you… being you.” Nellie waved her hand vaguely. “You’re quite accustomed to being aggressive.”
Sawyer shifted a little uncomfortably in her seat, suddenly feeling like she was sitting in an interrogation room. “An aggressive approach was never optional for me.” She heard herself adding, “It never is, when you’re starting from nothing. You have to claw your way up.”
Nellie nodded—not the automatic, meeting-room nod, but something more considered. “Where did you grow up?”
Sawyer had a standard answer for this question, deployed smoothly in approximately forty interviews over twenty years: “Seattle. It was just my parents and me. Nothing noteworthy about my childhood.”
Nellie didn’t push. She simply had more patience than the room required, and Sawyer, who had never in her adult life experienced the company of anyone to whom she felt compelled to keep talking without adequate professional incentive, found that she was talking.
“My mother cleaned offices. Three buildings downtown. She worked the overnight shift so she could be home before school started. My father—” She pushed lentils around her bowl.
“He was present intermittently. For the first twelve years, anyway. After that, he wasn’t present at all, which turned out to be marginally preferable. ”
“Twelve’s a hard age for intermittent,” Nellie said softly.
“Every age is a hard age for intermittent,” Sawyer muttered. “I learned that faster than I would have preferred.”
Nellie nodded. Then she said a little more brightly, “The Oregon campaign—the one I worked on in 2019 that actually worked—we had forty-one days and no legal team and a county board that had already made up its mind.” The instant change of subject caught Sawyer slightly off guard, but she appreciated it nonetheless.
“I borrowed a car to get to the survey sites because mine had failed its emissions test and I couldn’t afford the repair.
We ate gas station sandwiches for three weeks. ”
“And you won.”
“We won.” Nellie smiled at the table, not at Sawyer. “Took three more months of legal filings after the initial decision, and we had a volunteer attorney who billed exactly zero hours and was worth every penny of it. But yes. We won.”
“And Montana?” Sawyer asked. She’d read the file. She said it anyway.