CHAPTER 7 – NELLIE #2
Memories of the previous night kept surfacing in peripheral ways—the woodstove crackling, the soup going cold in her own bowl while she’d listened to Sawyer talk about Singapore, about her parents that she’d mentioned once and hadn’t circled back to, information which had landed somewhere in Nellie’s chest and stayed there.
Sawyer had sat at her kitchen table like she was slightly surprised to be doing it and utterly disinclined to leave.
Nellie had noticed both things and had chosen, so far, to file them under inconclusive rather than significant.
They hit the first riparian zone at the three-hour mark.
The terrain dropped into a narrow, sheltered gully where the stream moved quieter and slower than it did lower on the property—older water through older ground, with the unhurried quality of something that had been doing this long enough to stop rushing.
Red alder and willow overhung the banks.
Nellie stepped straight into the mud without breaking stride, feeling it close around her boot to mid-ankle.
“You’re just going in?” Sawyer asked from the bank.
“Yes.”
“Into the mud?”
“That’s where the interesting things are.” She was already crouching, scanning the exposed root systems along the near bank. “You don’t have to. You can stand there if you want.”
“I wasn’t—” Sawyer stopped, looked at the mud, then stepped in.
The mud made a deeply satisfying sound. Sawyer looked at her boot then continued forward. “What are we looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I—” Under the bank overhang, half-buried in the seep moss, she spotted a salamander. A large one, dark brown and river-stone flat, with the broad head and the muscular stillness she’d have recognized in her sleep.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, hello.”
She forgot about Sawyer. Not entirely—some part of her registered the presence, the sound of breathing two feet to her left—but she set it aside. She pulled the field camera with two fingers, clicked to macro, and began.
“Dicamptodon tenebrosus,” she narrated quietly, the habit from early fieldwork, for focus rather than audience.
“Pacific giant. Mature adult. Bank structure here is perennial seep. Look at the moss layering on the overhang. That hasn’t dried out in decades, and you can read it like rings.
” She shifted to shoot from a lower angle.
“Associated vegetation is textbook: skunk cabbage, sedge, liverwort on the exposed rock face. This is a breeding corridor. It has to be.”
When Nellie finally looked up from her camera, Sawyer had not moved. She stood behind her left shoulder, hands in her pockets, looking expectant.
“What does that mean?” Sawyer asked, quietly, like she’d understood without being told that quiet was required here. “For the case?”
Nellie stood slowly, keeping her movement low until she was clear of the overhang.
“It means we have documented evidence of a protected species in an active breeding habitat in an undisturbed riparian corridor.” She waved her notebook in the air like a smoking gun.
“The Pacific giant salamander triggers mandatory survey review under the state’s Priority Habitats framework.
Combined with the Botrychium I found in the eastern zone last week”—she was writing fast, not looking up—“Gina Marsh’s access restriction just became the most counterproductive decision she’s made since that email. ”
Sawyer was silent for a while, as if she were conscious of interrupting. “What’s a riparian corridor?”
“The zone on either side of a waterway. Bank, floodplain, the transitional habitat where the water world and the land world negotiate.” Nellie gestured at the gully around them—the overhang, the root skirts, the way the alder dissolved into the stream.
“This is one. It’s the interface. Extraordinarily productive ecologically, disproportionately rare in intact condition.
” She held Sawyer’s gaze for a beat. “Which is the problem. And which is also, I suspect, why Gina specifically tried to shut me out of it.”
Sawyer opened her mouth, undoubtedly to throw back a retort, but closed it again when she seemingly came up empty.
“Lucky I’ve got a company escort.” Nellie smirked.
“Right,” Sawyer said drily. “Lucky.”
Nellie found nothing much else of note before they began their descent. Not that it mattered; she was already starting to believe that she’d won this fight in record time. Perhaps Sawyer was starting to realize that, too, and that’s why she was unnervingly quiet for the return hike.
They were about a mile from the cottage, descending through the lower slope, when the ground gave without warning.
Nellie’s left foot came down into a root hollow disguised under a mat of duff, and her ankle rolled outward sharply. She grabbed the nearest thing—a small alder—and cursed.
At least thirty seconds of deep breathing were required before she was brave enough to assess the impact with her full weight. The verdict came back fast and unambiguous: not broken, probably not badly sprained, but absolutely going to punish her for every single remaining step of this mile.
“Are you alright?” Sawyer asked..
“Yeah, just twisted my ankle.” Nellie winced, half in pain, half in embarrassment.
Sawyer looked at the terrain between them and the cottage. She didn’t hesitate. She moved to Nellie’s left side, shifted the secondary pack to her other hand, and offered her shoulder.
“Lean on me.”
Nellie stared, mouth slightly agape, debating whether or not to politely decline.
Instead, she allowed Sawyer to wrap her arm around her waist, enveloping her in cloud-soft fleece and expensive perfume.
They continued the journey in silence. Sawyer matched her pace—shortened and uneven—without comment, without the hovering overattentiveness that some people defaulted to around an injury and that Nellie had always found more exhausting than the injury itself.
The forest settled into late-afternoon quiet around them. The bird noise had dropped to scattered and low. Below, the stream flowed..
Nellie could hear Sawyer breathing. She had to force herself not to think about how close their faces were, but utterly failed.
And when Sawyer took hold of her wrist to anchor her arm more securely around her shoulders, Nellie prayed to any deity that might listen that the stern, professional, billionaire CEO couldn’t feel the thunderous hammering at her pulse point.
Any interest between the two of them would be, she reminded herself, complicated in ways that barely needed articulating.
There was a deal on the table. There were eighty million dollars of development project, and sixty—fifty-something—days that hadn’t concluded yet.
There was a gap of twelve years and a gap of approximately four billion dollars and both of those gaps were real even if, in this particular mile, through this particular forest, neither of them felt especially relevant.
Hell, Nellie didn’t even know if Sawyer liked women.
This was not a helpful line of thinking. She was a scientist. She had data, and she had rigor, and what she did not have was a reliable model for what Sawyer Alburn canceling three meetings to walk through ferns might mean.
The cottage mercifully appeared through the trees.
At the bottom of the porch steps, they separated naturally, like something unclenching. Nellie found the railing. Sawyer set the secondary pack on the step without being asked, and stepped back.
“Ice it,” she said. The only thing she’d said in the last fifteen minutes.
“I will.” Nellie tested the first step, found it manageable. “Thank you. For—” She gestured, a small motion that tried to cover the mile and the shoulder and, she supposed, the entire expedition.
Sawyer nodded once and turned toward the access track and her car.
Nellie went inside.
She pressed her back against the door, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply.