CHAPTER 14 – SAWYER
The treadmill was set at six miles per hour. Sawyer had set it there herself, and she was aware, in a detached and faintly contemptuous way, that it should not be presenting a problem.
She lasted approximately five minutes before she was losing her mind.
The blank wall in front of her had never previously garnered a visceral reaction.
It was drywall. It was painted that particular shade of off-white that interior designers charged a remarkable amount of money to call warm ivory and that Sawyer had selected from a swatch card in approximately thirty seconds three years ago without regret.
It had functioned, for three years, as an entirely adequate void to look at while she ran.
It contained no information of any kind, which had always been the point; it kept her mind sharp and quiet on the other side of the exertion, uncluttered by visual input.
That was the system. The system had served her well.
Except for today.
Today the wall was now a canvas, and the thing her mind was painting on it had dark hair and eyes flecked with gold and a tendency to say I’m just as lost as you are.
She hit stop.
The belt slowed. Sawyer stepped off, pulled her phone from the cupholder, and sat down on the carpet with a loud huff. The heart rate monitor blinked reproachfully at her from the display. She ignored it. She opened a browser, typed flatscreen TV, and started scrolling.
Despite having more money than the human brain could possibly fathom, Sawyer Alburn was not, under normal circumstances, an impulsive buyer.
There were people in her life—investors, board members, one particularly persistent VP of acquisitions—who would have laughed until they wept at the suggestion that Sawyer Alburn bought anything without running a full comparison matrix.
She had a spreadsheet, last updated four months ago, for the category of potential large appliance purchases.
It included twelve weighted variables. She had never found a way to explain this to anyone without them looking at her as though it were excessive, which it wasn’t; it was systematic.
The spreadsheet did not enter her mind. She opened the first listing that came up, confirmed it had a same-day delivery window, and bought it. Sixty-five inch. Whatever brand that was. Done.
Martha picked up on the second ring, already at her desk, which was how she existed between the hours of seven a.m. and seven p.m. as far as Sawyer could tell.
“I’m taking the day,” Sawyer said.
She was met with silence. The soft, familiar percussion of the keyboard paused.
“I’ll clear your calendar,” Martha said, no further questions.
“Hand the supplier call to Leanne.”
“Of course.”
“And the two o’clock.”
“Yes.”
Sawyer waited. Martha gave her nothing. No are you well?, no is everything alright?, just efficient, quiet keyboard sounds while she cleared the calendar.
“Martha,” Sawyer said.
“Mm.”
“You’re not going to say anything?”
“About what?”
“About the fact that I have never once called to cancel a full day in all ten years of your employment.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because”—Martha sighed—“you’d tell me it’s none of my business. Will that be everything?”
Sawyer looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Sometime in the last hour the sky had changed character entirely, the pallid gray of early dawn replaced by something darker and more like time was retreating to nightfall and skipping the day entirely.
A bank of cloud was rolling in from the northwest with what she could only describe as malicious intent.
She watched it absorb what was left of the light.
“That’ll be everything,” she murmured.
The TV arrived within three hours.
Sawyer had spent the intervening time doing precisely nothing productive, which was a condition she found actively miserable.
She had poured herself four cups of coffee, walked the length of her apartment more times than she could count, stood in front of the refrigerator for two full minutes without opening it, and had finally resorted to reviewing the last six months of her own company’s network traffic data, which she had no business reviewing personally and which had failed, comprehensively, to hold her attention for longer than twelve minutes at a stretch.
The Nellie problem sat in the middle of everything she attempted to think about and refused to be moved.
It was not, she’d established, an emotional problem in any simple sense.
She had plenty of experience managing emotion, filing it neatly into the appropriate compartment and returning to it at a reasonable hour.
This was something else. This had the quality of a calculation she couldn’t stop running because she couldn’t locate the correct answer, and every time she thought she’d arrived at a conclusion, she heard it can’t be all that terrible, being lost together, and the entire model collapsed.
She had tried, in a specific and focused way, to run the analysis from the other direction.
To start with the conclusion she needed—Nellie Fuller is a professional complication and nothing more—and construct the reasoning backwards.
She had done this successfully with financial decisions, legal risks, two board coups, and a hostile media cycle in 2019 that had required her own special brand of galvanized confidence to walk through without flinching.
She tried it now with one ecologist who drove a converted van and she had kissed twice in the middle of the forest and apparently had no idea how comprehensively she had dismantled Sawyer’s universe in the process.
The argument would not hold. Every point she built, it stood on something that turned out to be Nellie’s delighted smile, or the specific look on her face on that ridge—not triumphant, not uncertain, just clear—and the whole structure quietly fell apart.
When the buzzer went, she crossed her penthouse with more enthusiasm than was strictly warranted for a delivery. Any distraction was a distraction, after all.
The man at the door was young and keen, he began explaining something about setup services but Sawyer had already taken the first box from him before he’d finished his sentence.
“I’ve got it.” She waved him off.
“We’re actually required to offer—”
“Thank you.” She took the second box. “That’ll be all.”
He looked at the third box, which was still on the trolly, then back at her. “The stand unit is in the—”
“Leave it there. I’ll get it.”
She did get it. She maneuvered it through the door herself, marginally regretting the decision by the time it was inside and absolutely not changing her mind about it.
She brewed a fifth coffee and then retrieved the toolkit from the storage cabinet that she had packed and organized herself when she’d moved in and which contained, among other things: a stud finder, a level, and the correct drill bit for every common wall material because she was a person who anticipated all foreseeable situations and preferred to be overly prepared.
In all honesty, she hadn’t once thought about doing any form of DIY since the decorators had left three years ago, but it was the principle of just in case that had seen the purchase of an extensive toolkit graduate from the spreadsheet of potential large purchases.
Installing the wall bracket turned out to require moving the treadmill first. The treadmill was not light.
It took the better part of forty minutes to drag it back across the carpet, and Sawyer was disheveled and faintly sweating by the time she’d marked the stud positions and started drilling.
The bracket, when it went in, was level to within a tolerance she was satisfied with.
She stood back, hands on her hips, stud finder still in one hand.
The blank wall now had something on it. Progress.
Unfortunately, Nellie’s earnest face remained burned onto the inside of her eyelids. Not so much progress there.
Sawyer was considering whether to hang the screen before lunch when the door buzzed for a second time today.
Martha was standing in the hall holding three takeout boxes stacked to her chin and looking at Sawyer with the expression she reserved for situations she had correctly predicted and had chosen, out of professional courtesy, not to predict out loud.
Sawyer looked at the boxes.
“If any of those are salad,” she said, “I’m terminating your contract.”
“It’s not salad.”
“That top one looks suspiciously like it might be salad.”
Martha shifted her grip. “It’s guacamole.”
Sawyer stepped aside and let her in.
The boxes were from the Mexican place on the east side of town that Sawyer had mentioned perhaps twice in eighteen months, which meant Martha had filed it and retrieved it at exactly the relevant moment.
This was precisely the kind of thing Martha did that Sawyer had long ago stopped finding surprising and started simply factoring in as a feature of her existence.
She seized the boxes while Martha took in the state of the penthouse—the TV packaging stacked against the wall, the toolkit spread across the carpet, and the treadmill now situated in a frankly bizarre position halfway across the doorway of the room Sawyer loosely referred to as her “gym”.
Martha squinted beyond it at the large black bracket now in the center of the back wall.
“I did that,” Sawyer confirmed smugly, already pulling open the first takeout box.
“I see.”
“It’s level.”
“I assumed it would be.”
Sawyer almost burst into tears when she saw the burrito.
It was the size of a forearm, still warm through the foil, and smelled like something her stomach had apparently been pining for since approximately four a.m. She bit into it, and the sound she made was certainly not one she would have made in a professional context.