CHAPTER 13 – NELLIE
The phone rang exactly once before Martha picked up.
Just one clean electronic beat, and then Martha’s crisp voice. “Nellie. One moment.”
Not Ms. Fuller. Not the usual measured pause while the call was routed through three layers of corporate architecture designed to remind you, courteously but firmly, that you were not the important one in this particular transaction.
One moment.
Then: “Nellie.” Sawyer’s voice, low and careful, hinting at something she couldn’t immediately classify.
Four seconds, start to finish. Nellie had counted.
She was standing on the cottage porch with her phone pressed to her ear and the county survey maps spread across the railing in front of her.
What she was experiencing—gaping at nothing while the stream ran below and the trees dripped quietly from last night’s rain—was the quiet, structural click of something she’d been working hard to leave unconfirmed now confirming itself.
She had become a priority.
All that was left to determine was whether it was for amicable or hostile reasons that Sawyer Alburn herself would be paying such close attention.
“I… um… I know about the planning application,” Nellie finally sputtered. Starting there seemed the only intellectually honest move available to her.
“Yes, I thought you might.” Straight to the point, no dancing. It was one of the few things about Sawyer she’d stopped finding rattling and started finding comforting. Nellie had a feeling that Gina Marsh might be more of the elaborately-choreographed-diversion-tactics type.
Sawyer cut straight to the chase. “I only saw it this morning. It went through development routing. My name on the cover sheet was auto-populated. I didn’t authorize the filing.”
“But you knew about the submission.”
Sawyer took a beat to respond. “Gina briefed me on a preliminary approach. She didn’t specify the timing or that it had already been submitted to the county.”
“So… you technically knew about it but didn’t know she’d filed it already.”
“Correct.”
Nellie pressed her thumb into the edge of the survey map and thought about that.
The distinction was real—she believed Sawyer was telling her both of those things—but there was a territory between them, a gap where an eighty-million-dollar development project and the CEO who signed the checks lived, and she couldn’t quite see all the way into it from here.
She believed her. She also couldn’t fully trust her.
“I had the cover sheet corrected,” Sawyer said, into the silence she’d apparently decided needed filling. “Gina’s name as the originating executive. Effective today.”
“I see… But you have no intention to withdraw the application?”
Sawyer took much longer to chew over this question, such that Nellie began chewing on her own lip.
“The application is a means to save time, should the project end up going ahead once our agreement has… elapsed.”
“Mhm.” Nellie continued chewing on her lip, not bothering to disguise her discontent at the implications in those words. She heard Sawyer heave a deep sigh and imagined her pinching the bridge of her nose the way she did when she was frustrated and trying to keep her cool.
“It doesn’t mean that we all expect you to fail, Nellie.
It doesn’t mean that I expect you to fail.
It just…” For a rare moment, it appeared that the billionaire businesswoman was lost for words.
But then, “I don’t even know why I feel guilty right now,” she muttered.
“I don’t know why I feel like I should be apologizing or trying to comfort you or who knows what.
This is my company; of course I should be supporting the advancement of the expansion project we’ve spent years planning.
Why do I feel like I’ve double-crossed you somehow because of some paperwork that was filed without my knowledge? ”
Nellie’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. She had no idea either why Sawyer would be feeling guilty about this, and anyone would understand that the right business move would be to prepare for every possible outcome. Sawyer had no reason to feel like she’d made any shady moves.
But Nellie couldn’t deny the thrill it gave her to know that Sawyer felt bad. To know that the CEO who should be her enemy was worried about hurting her feelings.
“Will you walk the northern boundary with me tomorrow morning?” she asked. “I need an escort for the upper zones. And I’d… I’d like it to be you. If you’ve got the time, I mean. Not a site representative.”
“Eight o’clock,” Sawyer said immediately. “I’ll bring good coffee.”
Nellie was chewing her lip again, this time around an indulgent grin. “Okay. Eight o’clock.”
She ended the call and stood with the phone pressed against her sternum for a moment, looking at the sky through the canopy.
“Right,” she said to no one.
Then she went inside and threw her best field pants and the one fleece that didn’t have holes in into the washing machine, which was just because it was laundry day and had absolutely nothing to do with anything else whatsoever.
Sawyer arrived at seven fifty-one, which Nellie was increasingly certain was a constitutional condition rather than a choice.
She stepped out in her technical layers and the same boots, visibly broken in now along the right toe where she’d caught the nurse log on the northern hike.
There was something about that specific detail—the scuffing, the evidence of actual terrain—that Nellie found unreasonably endearing, and she was going to need to stop cataloguing unreasonably endearing things about Sawyer Alburn or she was going to need an entirely new filing system.
“You’re early,” Nellie said.
Sawyer looked at her watch. “Nine minutes.” She picked up the secondary pack from the porch step without being invited. “Lead the way.”
Nellie opened her mouth, closed it, and turned toward the tree line.
She’d planned to ask, directly, before they left.
About Sawyer’s guilt the day before, about what it meant, about whether she was still feeling it—or anything else for that matter.
She had rehearsed it three times on the porch.
What came out instead, as they hit the first understory, was: “Watch the root at ten o’clock. ”
Sawyer stepped over it cleanly. “I see it.”
Nellie marked this in the category of small, private victories and kept walking.
The route cut northeast through mixed timber she hadn’t fully sampled yet—Douglas fir transitioning through a stand of western red cedar that smelled, in the damp autumn air, like the inside of her grandmother’s blanket chest. Nellie moved at her usual pace, the ground reading like a familiar language under her feet, and beside her Sawyer walked with a controlled, ground-eating stride that didn’t usually come from a penchant for treadmills.
Nellie noticed the quietness first. Not the forest’s quiet, which was consistent and various and full of information, but Sawyer’s quiet.
Sheepish almost. The counterpoint of dry observations and precisely-timed questions she’d come to expect had gone, replaced by an attentiveness without particular focus.
She was walking and thinking, and she wasn’t disguising either.
Nellie, who had spent eight years learning how landscapes concealed things, noticed this the way she noticed buried drainage. Gradually. Then all at once.
She wanted to ask. But asking required knowing what she was asking about, and knowing what she was asking about required being willing to hear the answer, and Nellie wasn’t ready to go on record about wanting to hear it.
Instead, she waited.
“Where’d you grow up?” Sawyer suddenly asked, apparently electing to fill the silence with something other than what was eating her from the inside.
Nellie stepped over a submerged root, tested the far side with her boot toe, and said: “New Mexico. Small place. We didn’t have a yard, so my mom commandeered a plot in the community garden two blocks over.
” She glanced back long enough to confirm Sawyer had navigated the root, then kept moving.
“She grew food mostly. Tomatoes, squash, beans. Sometimes she’d sell seedlings at the spring plant sale to cover the garden plot fee.
Sometimes she’d take the extra crops to the food pantry on the same street. ”
“I suppose you’d call her a nurturer?”
The question landed neatly, exactly where the thought had been going.
Nellie hadn’t expected Sawyer to aim at it that accurately.
“She used to say the difference between a plant sale and a food bank was just geography. Whoever turned up to either place was somebody trying to make something grow.” She stepped through a gap in the ferns and heard Sawyer follow.
“She was better with strangers than my dad. She had this theory that plants taught you to pay attention to what something actually needed, not what you expected it to be.”
“She sounds like someone worth knowing.”
“She is,” Nellie smiled. “Lives with her sister in Albuquerque now. We FaceTime on Thursdays. She thinks I’m in some kind of extended camping situation and hasn’t quite processed that the van is on purpose.
” She ducked a low alder branch and held it back without making it obvious she was doing it.
“I let her maintain that interpretation because the alternative involves a whole conversation about my life choices.”
“And your life choices have been—?”
“Excellent. Defensible. Not currently eligible for her unsolicited input.”
She glanced back at Sawyer and expected the flat look she’d gotten in earlier weeks when she’d been flippant about something that turned out to matter.
What she got instead was something considerably less manageable: Sawyer listening, really listening, with the easy, somewhat placating smile, she sometimes had when nothing in the vicinity was more interesting than what was being said.