CHAPTER 14 – SAWYER #2
Martha sat opposite her at the kitchen island with her own burrito and chewed thoughtfully, watching Sawyer with the calm, patient attention of her executive assistant running through a mental checklist and ticking off items without needing to name them aloud.
Sawyer ate. The rain had found the windows by now, a clattering, persistent sound that built gradually to a cacophony.
“Go ahead.” Sawyer sighed when the silence had accumulated enough thickness to be sliceable.
Martha chewed. “You’re not yourself these days.”
“That’s it? That’s your opening?”
“I find blunt efficient.” Martha shrugged.
“You have been distracted. You spend an awful lot of time staring out your office window and much less time commanding the ship, as it were. You’re avoiding the shareholders, summoning Gina to your office so often that she might as well set up camp there, and—”
“I get the picture.” She massaged her temples with the tips of her fingers.
“You know I know it’s Nellie Fuller, right?”
Sawyer put her burrito down directly onto the marble island.
There was something fundamentally absurd about the fact that the most honest conversation she’d had in several months was happening in her own home, over burritos, with her executive assistant.
She had a therapist. She had never once said anything to her therapist that she hadn’t edited extensively in advance.
“Yes… okay… it’s Nellie Fuller.” She sighed.
Martha simply waited.
Sawyer stared through the doorway at the wall bracket, which had no helpful opinions.
“I find myself in a position I don’t know how to reason my way through.
” She picked up her burrito, and put it down again.
“On one side, I have a company I built from nothing. Years of tough decisions, every single one of them made to protect what I put together, and I’m not prepared to apologize for any of them.
” She stopped. Martha said nothing. Sawyer appreciated this.
“On the other, there is a woman, a fascinating woman who hasn’t once been afraid of me, which alone is an experience I have no prior data for.
And I am becoming increasingly aware that I cannot simply risk-manage people’s feelings. Her’s or… or my own.”
Martha peeled the foil back on her burrito slowly. Clearly, she had no intention of offering anything to the conversation until Sawyer had talked her way through her conundrum out loud.
“I could make this problem go away,” Sawyer continued.
“Legally. Gina’s been suggesting it for weeks.
The petition, the county campaign, the public momentum—there are avenues.
Loopholes in the agreement that my team could exploit.
A few strategic delays that would effectively neuter the timeline of her protest before the board vote. It would not be a complicated play.”
“No.” Martha nodded.
“No,” Sawyer repeated. “It wouldn’t.” She stood up.
There was not, technically, anywhere to go, but she crossed to the windows anyway and looked at the city below, which was gray and glistening and half-drowned at this point.
“But… I’m not sure I could do it.” She said it quietly, not entirely certain Martha had even heard.
“I’m not sure I could live with myself, after.
And I have”—she pressed two fingers to her temples briefly—“I have spent a considerable amount of my life not caring very much what I looked like to myself in retrospect, because the decisions made sense at the time, and the outcomes justified the methodology, and I was always able to construct a coherent argument for why the thing I did was the right thing to do.” She turned from the window.
“I don’t think I could construct that argument here. ”
Martha was looking at her with an expression Sawyer didn’t often see on her face.
Something softer than the usual calibrated neutrality.
It sat on her features like a specter that could have been sympathy, if only their professional relationship had space that could be occupied for such familiarity.
“Nellie Fuller is trying to protect something she loves,” Martha eventually said. “It seems as though you may have inadvertently stumbled down a path to where you might be able to relate to that.”
Sawyer blinked.
She had not expected that. Not the sentiment—she could have arrived there herself, had arrived there in various orbits around it—but Martha saying it, plainly and without hedging, as if it were simply a fact she’d observed and had been waiting for the right moment to voice.
Martha, who had watched Sawyer fire two vice presidents in one afternoon without batting an eye.
Martha, who had been present for the Singapore crisis and the Series C renegotiation and had deployed the eyebrow four times in ten years as her full expression of editorial opinion. That Martha.
“You mean she has weaponized my emotions to achieve her own ends?”
“No.” Martha rolled her eyes. “I mean that she set out to fight for her beloved trees, to take a stand even when she likely believed she had no hope of winning. And it just so happens that she has reminded you of what passion looks like in the process. I’m not surprised you find her somewhat captivating. ”
“Since when,” Sawyer said slowly, “do you have a soft spot for environmental activists?”
Martha picked up her burrito again. “I don’t have a soft spot for environmental activists.”
“You just defended one with considerable warmth.”
“I defended someone who walked into your orbit without a plan and stayed anyway.” She took a bite, chewed, looked at Sawyer without apology. “That’s not just an activist. That’s a person with more backbone than most of your board combined. I find that difficult not to respect.”
Sawyer padded back to her stool at the island and took a long gulp of cold coffee.
“She is quite beguiling, I’ll give her that,” she muttered.
Martha chuckled quietly. “You built your company because you wanted something nobody could take from you. Nellie Fuller chained herself to a tree for the same reason. She’s just less interested in doing it quietly.
I have watched you meet formidable people for a decade, Sawyer.
She’s the first one who has ever made you cancel your meetings and move your furniture. ”
“I moved the furniture to install a wall bracket.”
“You moved your treadmill because you couldn’t stare at the blank wall without thinking of her.” Martha’s tone was entirely even, which made it worse. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.”
Sawyer picked at her burrito and blew out a long, suffering sigh.
“I think I’m falling in love with her,” she whispered. She had not said it before. She hadn’t intended to say it now. Breathing it out as quietly as possible felt as close as she could get to avoiding the confession. “Which is—”
“Complicated,” Martha offered.
“Catastrophic. I was going to say catastrophic.”
“Is it?”
Sawyer dropped her head into her hands, entirely disregarding whether or not she might be getting salsa in her hair.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” she moaned.
“I don’t know how to protect the company and not destroy her at the same time, and I don’t know how to choose between them, and I’ve never in my adult life found myself in a situation where I couldn’t maneuver all the pieces to fit perfectly together. ”
“Maybe,” Martha said carefully, “you’ve been a slave to the company for so many years that you’ve forgotten that you’re the boss. You can make any piece fit however you want it to, even if that means changing its shape or throwing one off the board entirely.”
Sawyer looked at her.
“That,” she said after a moment, “is surprisingly useful.”
“I have my moments.”
“I’m still paying you the same amount regardless.”
“I know,” Martha said. “It’s fine. I was planning on expensing the Mexican food anyway.”
“Understood.” Sawyer chuckled. “Well, seeing as you’re still being paid even when I take the day off, you might as well help me with this flatscreen.”
The rain had grown heavier while they worked, hammering at the windows until the city was completely obscured behind a blurred sheet. Thunder, low and rolling, announced itself from a distance and then arrived with ten times the force. The windows lit white, once. Then again.
Sawyer was about to comment on the pathetic fallacy of it all when everything went dark.
The lights cut. The city below swallowed itself whole, every building extinguished simultaneously in a way she’d never seen and hadn’t thought was possible, a blackout that ate the skyline she had looked at from this window eight hundred times until it was simply gone, replaced by a darkness that went all the way to the horizon.
Lightning illuminated it once, stark white, like a photograph of the city without itself.
Sawyer was on her feet. She was back at the window in an instant, staring at the dark, and one thought arrived with such clarity that it crowded out everything else in her head—all the careful reasoning, all the unresolved calculations, all of Martha’s correct observations—and it was not complicated and not conflicted and not in need of a spreadsheet.
It was Nellie, in a cottage alone, in the middle of a forest in a blackout, in a storm that was now shaking the glass, and Sawyer had driven the access road often enough to know exactly where it was in the dark.
She grabbed her keys.