CHAPTER 11 – NELLIE
The toast had been burning for approximately forty seconds before Nellie registered it as her problem.
She was standing at the kitchen window with her coffee mug held halfway to her mouth, conducting what she had privately classified—in the interest of maintaining some dignity—as a perimeter check.
Not watching for a car. Not oscillating between the access track and the clock in a way that would, if filmed, resemble the behavior of a very anxious meerkat.
A perimeter check. Methodical. Spatial awareness.
Nellie Fuller was a field ecologist with forty-three documented species across three riparian zones and an increasingly urgent hypothesis about the northern sector’s hydrology, and she was—
The smoke alarm weighed in.
“Okay!” She yanked the toaster lever and surveyed the damage.
Both sides had committed fully to the cause.
She scraped the top slice over the sink with the pragmatic resolve of someone cutting losses on a failed experiment, then held the second slice up to the window light and made the call that it was, technically, still bread.
She applied butter on the grounds that butter resolved most problems and ate it standing at the counter with her back to the window, which lasted eleven seconds before her neck made a unilateral decision.
The access track was still empty.
She checked the time. Seven forty-two. She had checked the access track fourteen times this morning, which was approximately thirteen more than any professional operation—or healthy mental state—required. She was going to stop. Starting now. Absolutely no more perimeter checks.
She checked the access track again.
The pinging sound from her laptop had Nellie jumping out of her skin, first in shock and then in her haste to reach the table.
An email had arrived from Alburn Systems Legal Office.
Subject: Phoenix Ridge Acreage—Survey Access Confirmation.
Two paragraphs of formal language navigating two sub-clauses and one reference to the original access agreement before arriving, in its final sentence, at the thing it was actually saying.
“The northern boundary markers had been reset to their original positions as documented in the initial acquisition survey, effective immediately.”
Signed: Sawyer Alburn.
Not Gina’s office. Not a site representative. Not some operations directive passed down through an unnamed chain. Sawyer. In full, at the bottom, the same clean signature Nellie had seen on the original access agreement.
Her teeth arduously ground down on the burnt toast as she read the email three more times. Then she almost jumped out of her skin again as her phone vibrated loudly on the table.
“Sheesh!” she yelped,. “I thought I lived a somewhat calm life.”
Of course, there was no reason for her to be surprised; her best friend called every morning so that they could share life updates over breakfast. Clearly Nellie was a little on edge these days.
“The boundary’s been reset,” she said the moment the line connected.
Paloma’s reply came somewhat garbled around the buzz of an electric toothbrush, signaling that she was running late this morning. “All markers?”
“Yep. The email came directly from Alburn’s legal office. Sawyer signed it herself.”
“And she wants what, exactly?”
“I don’t think she wants anything.” Nellie pushed her coffee mug aside and put the phone on speaker so she could return to her toast. “I think she found out what Gina did and corrected it.”
She heard Paloma spit into the sink more forcefully than was strictly necessary. “You think she corrected it out of the goodness of her heart?”
“I think she corrected it because it was wrong and she—”
“Nellie, what’s the catch?”
“I’m not sure there is one.”
“Pfft. There’s always a catch. That’s what being rich means.
You manufacture the catch yourself and then release it at a time of your choosing.
” Paloma sighed deeply. “She’s not your friend, Nellie.
She’s the person on the other side of a legal agreement with an eighty-million-dollar reason to see you fail. ”
Nellie chewed on that statement, and somehow it made her jaw ache more than her burnt breakfast.
“I don’t know if she’s as evil as your conspiracy theories make her out to be, Pal.”
“Conspiracy? She’s a billionaire, Nellie! Of course we should be wary! Who even are you right now?”
“Ugh, I know!” Nellie screwed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know what to tell you. I just don’t get the feeling she’s trying to screw me over. I feel like I can get through to her!”
The unmistakable sound of tires on gravel scratched at her ears.
Nellie’s whole body went still.
“I have to call you back,” she mumbled.
“Nellie, wait—”
She ended the call.
She also noticed, two seconds before the car came into view through the kitchen window, that she was covered in black toast crumbs.
She brushed down her fleece with both hands.
Then she raked her fingers through her hair and immediately registered she’d probably made whatever was happening there considerably worse.
Sawyer Alburn stepped out of her car like a European supermodel—expression arranged, posture graceful, the car door swinging closed behind her like a million-dollar commercial.
Dark coat, not the cashmere. The boots, visibly broken in now.
Her hair pulled back cleanly. She looked like she’d made a considered peace with this terrain without surrendering an inch of herself to it, which was, Nellie thought—in a completely objective, professionally detached capacity—intensely irritating and also not quite the right word for the feeling.
She went to the door.
“Ms. Alburn.” She was being professional.
“Ms. Fuller.” Sawyer stopped at the foot of the porch steps and her gaze dropped briefly to Nellie’s collar.
“Toast.” Nellie coughed, locating the crumbs by feel. “Yes.”
“I’m here to walk the survey boundary with the site manager,” Sawyer said. “Confirm the reset is consistent with the original acquisition plot.”
Nellie looked past her at the empty car. “Where’s the site manager?”
“Unavoidably detained.”
“Right…”
Sawyer held her gaze and did not elaborate on the nature of the detention, or on why she’d come anyway, or on the strange energy currently occupying the space between them.
“Well.” Nellie reached back for her jacket from the hook behind the door. “I suppose you’ll need a guide, then.”
The lower slope was Nellie’s easiest circuit—two hours out, less on the return, through mixed conifer she’d been walking long enough to navigate without demanding her full attention.
Which was useful, because the survey required almost none of it and her full attention was currently otherwise engaged.
She did not think about this. She pointed out a nurse log, a bracket fungus colony, and the specific arc of slope where the drainage would be running heavily next month.
Sawyer walked at her left shoulder and asked questions that were, without exception, more perceptive than anything Nellie would have predicted three weeks ago.
“The restriction cost you several days of meaningful access,” Sawyer said, at the first switchback. “Yes, well, twenty-nine days remaining, technically.” Nellie stepped over a large root and stared intently at the ground until she had confirmed that Sawyer had safely done the same. “I’ll manage.”
“You sound certain.”
“I am certain.” She glanced sideways. “You sound skeptical.”
“Pragmatic.” Sawyer ducked under a low alder branch without breaking stride. “Not the same thing.”
“In this case, it is.”
“The statutory threshold requires co-occurrence documentation across—”
“I know what it requires.” Nellie pushed through a stand of young firs and tried to position her body in a way that didn’t plainly state that she was holding them back for Sawyer to pass. “I’ve been doing this for eight years.”
“Eight years in two-month windows from a van,” Sawyer said, and there was something in it—not quite dry, more like wry, a category Nellie had not previously associated with Sawyer Alburn, which said something about the distance they’d covered since a livestream and a padlock and a thermos of objectively terrible coffee. “This is arguably different.”
“Slightly.”
“Slightly.” Sawyer rolled her eyes.
Nellie laughed and heard how freely it came out and didn’t try to reel it back.
The light was dropping at that low autumn angle she’d come to love without deciding to, long and golden, moving when the wind moved.
It did something to the general atmosphere that was not, objectively, helping her maintain a rigorous professional demeanor, and she wished she could lodge a formal complaint with whoever had designed October in a Douglas fir forest.
“Do you ever just walk?” she asked.
Sawyer glanced sideways. “Walk?”
“Without a destination, justust”—she gestured at the slope, the canopy, the light doing its thing—“this.”
Sawyer’s eyebrows drew together. “No.”
“Never?”
“I run in the mornings. On a treadmill.”
Nellie stopped walking.
“It’s efficient,” Sawyer said, clearly sensing the judgment or perhaps pity.
“Facing what?”
“A wall.”
Nellie stared at her for far too long. “A wall?”
“The wall doesn’t present variables early in the morning.”
“Sawyer.” She shook her head slowly. “I once spent three weeks in a parking lot in Oregon eating gas station sushi, and that is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”
“The gas station sushi is objectively more alarming.”
“The sushi was fine! The wall—” She started walking again, grinning at the path ahead. “Is that actually what you prefer, or is it just that you’ve never tried the alternative?”
Sawyer contemplated this for a moment, her gaze growing distant as if she was digging deep into her own psyche. “I used to walk before the company grew past a certain point. Early mornings.”
“Where?”