CHAPTER 11 – NELLIE #2
Another pause, shorter. “Along the route my mother took home.” Said evenly, a fact being submitted to record rather than a memory being opened. “When she worked overnight. If I timed it right, I could meet her bus and walk the last two miles with her.”
Nellie continued pushing through the brush, less concerned now with Sawyer noticing every time she held back a branch or slowed until she had successfully traversed a jagged rock.
There was nothing she could say at that moment that wouldn’t be smaller than what had just been offered, and Sawyer, she’d learned, didn’t give things like that with any expectation of return.
They were making the descent through the lower slope when Sawyer’s foot went sideways this time.
Nellie’s arm was at her waist before Sawyer even had time to yelp.
She caught her solidly—feet planted, one arm hooked firm around Sawyer’s back—and Sawyer’s hand came up and gripped Nellie’s forearm by reflex, fingers closing above her wrist, and they stood there: Sawyer not quite recovered, Nellie not quite having let go.
All that time she had spent this morning glancing out the window, silently willing Sawyer to appear, Nellie was starting to believe manifesting might be real.
Sawyer’s hand was on her arm. Sawyer’s face was mere inches from hers. Sawyer’s gaze dropped to her mouth.
Nellie started to panic, hastily pulling them both upright and trying to step away before she let herself drown completely in delusion. But Sawyer pulled her right back.
Close enough to plant her lips on Nellie’s.
Sawyer’s mouth was warm and sure, and she dominated the kiss in a way that Nellie felt in her sternum and her kneecaps and one or two other locations she wasn’t going to map in detail right now.
It took her brain perhaps ten seconds to catch up to what was happening, and only then did she recover the motor functions to really kiss Sawyer back. She brought her hand up to stroke Sawyer’s sharp jaw, the other still wrapped around her waist.
The forest and the survey and the multi-million dollar deal all fell away around them as they mapped each other’s lips.
Then Nellie’s phone went off.
Paloma. Full volume. The contact ringtone—the Jaws theme, assigned three years ago as a joke and now a sacred pillar of their friendship—filled the clearing with the serene inevitability of a natural disaster.
Sawyer’s head snapped back, her gaze moving briefly to Nellie’s jacket pocket, then back up. Something crossed her face that was not quite amusement and was not quite its opposite.
“She’ll call fourteen times if I don’t—”
“Answer it.” Sawyer stepped away. “Go ahead.”
Nellie nodded sheepishly as she unzipped her pocket. “Hey, Pal. What’s—?”
“Hey, so don’t get mad at me, but I’m in the public records archive. I pulled the county planning board index this morning.”
Sawyer had turned toward the stream, her back to Nellie, standing with her attention fixed somewhere on the water below and clearly, deliberately, making it none of her business. Nellie turned slightly the other way.
“And? What did you find?” she whispered
“Alburn Systems filed revised planning applications to the county board.” A weighted pause. “Updated infrastructure specifications, amended construction timeline for phase two. Northern sector foundation work.”
Nellie’s hand tightened on the phone.
She looked at Sawyer’s back. The slope. The late light still doing its terrible, beautiful thing through the canopy.
“That could be—”
“They filed it yesterday morning, Nellie. While your survey is still running. While you’ve still got weeks left on the deal. The application submits a revised schedule that positions them to break ground before a county board review could conclude, even if you trigger one.”
“Seems like Gina is still determined to be a pain in my ass,” Nellie grumbled, taking a few decisive steps farther from where Sawyer stood.
“Listen to me.” Paloma’s sigh held no shortage of frustration.
“Who’s to say it’s just her? Surely, a planning application goes through the CEO’s office, no?
That’s not some unauthorized operations directive.
That’s got to be Sawyer Alburn’s sign-off on a decision that says they’re moving forward whether or not you make your case. ”
The forest suddenly felt very quiet, as if even the birds were hushed and straining to hear the conversation.
“I’ll look at the filings,” Nellie finally whispered.
“I’ll send you the papers now.” Papers rustling through the phone. “Are you still in the field?”
“Wrapping up.”
“Is she there?”
The pause that followed lasted exactly one second too long. She heard Paloma clock it.
“I’ll call you later,” Nellie said.
“Okay.” Paloma was choosing, as an act of genuine mercy, not to push. “Call me tonight. And, Nellie—” She stopped, started again, and her voice came out gentler than usual. “Don’t trust too easily. Please.”
“I know.”
The line clicked off.
Sawyer had turned. She read the surface of Nellie’s face like it displayed all of the answers she was looking for, and then her lips pressed into a thin line. Lips that had earnestly captured Nellie’s not minutes before.
“I should head back,” Nellie said curtly.
Sawyer held her gaze for a moment. She didn’t ask about the call. “I’ll see myself out,” she said.
Nellie nodded and started up the slope without looking back.
She heard the car door close. The engine.
The tires on the gravel, moving back up the access track through the trees at that slow, careful pace, until the sound thinned and the forest swallowed it and there was nothing left but the stream and the last light and the filings arriving one by one in her inbox, Paloma’s message at the top of the chain: Docs attached. Call me.
Nellie stood at the porch railing and looked at the place where the track disappeared into the tree line.
She would call Sawyer tomorrow. Ask the question directly, cleanly, without a verdict already built into it; that was how she worked.
Evidence first. She would hear what the answer actually was rather than the answer she’d already half-decided, and she would assess it with the same rigor she applied to everything else.
That was the correct approach. That was what a scientist did.
She did not tell Paloma about the kiss.
She told herself this was because there was nothing definitive to report yet.
She told herself the two things—the kiss and the planning application—were distinct data points that deserved separate analysis, and collapsing them into one panicked phone call while Sawyer’s taillights were still cooling was not a rational approach to either.
Mostly, she didn’t tell Paloma because she wasn’t ready to say it out loud before she’d had time to hold it somewhere private for a while. Brief, certain, real—and she was not ready to offer that up to Paloma’s concerns, which were, she knew, very reasonable.