CHAPTER 15 – NELLIE
The laptop screen went dark mid-keystroke and the lamp took itself out a half-second later with a flat, conclusive click, but the generator picked up the slack almost immediately, humming to life from somewhere beyond the kitchen wall while the lights blinked back on with a slightly self-satisfied glow.
Nellie watched all of this happen from her chair, so accustomed to these blips in electrical power that she simply took the moment to roll her shoulders and crack her neck before getting back to work.
She glanced at the storm raging beyond the windows and saved her file again manually anyway, twice, out of principle. But soon enough her gaze was wandering back to the window.
The forest loomed enormous, not frightening exactly, but rearranged, all its usual textures blurred and its usual sounds pulled up by the roots and thrown elsewhere.
Lightning lit the canopy in a flat, eerie white, there and gone before Nellie’s brain finished registering it.
Then came the thunder, close enough that it sat in her chest cavity briefly before moving on.
Nellie smiled at the chaos and then made herself a cup of tea. There’s nothing better than a steaming cup of chamomile while a storm is tossing the outside world into chaos.
It was a very good storm. She stood at the window and watched it with the mug warm in both hands, the generator doing its quiet, purposeful work, and felt, for the first time in several weeks, something close to uncomplicated contentment.
The world outside was conducting itself with enormous, indifferent drama.
Nellie was inside with electricity and a full kettle and the kind of deep upholstered couch you could theoretically sleep on for a week if the conditions required it, which they did not, but it was good to know.
Field ecology had taught her to appreciate shelter the way you appreciated fresh water: fully, earnestly, and without taking the ceiling for granted.
A loud knock came in the deep breath between thunderclaps.
Nellie frowned at the door for a long while before she padded across the flagstones to open it. She was almost certain she knew who it was and decidedly less certain about whether she wanted to welcome such a visitor inside.
Unsurprisingly—or extremely surprisingly depending on who you asked—Sawyer Alburn was standing on the cottage porch absolutely drenched.
Not caught-in-a-sprinkle damp. Not jogged-fifteen-feet-from-the-car wet.
She was rain-had-a-vendetta-against-her-specifically drenched.
Her jacket had gone dark with it, her silvery hair clung to her cheeks, and there was a steady stream running along her jawline and dripping from her chin onto her no doubt ludicrously expensive shoes.
She looked Nellie up and down with rapid, scanning attention.
“Are you alright?” she demanded.
Nellie blinked. She leaned against the doorframe and looked at the state of her guest. “I’m fine. Are you?”
“The power’s out all over—”
“I have a generator.” Nellie tilted her head. “In fact, I have two. You had a backup installed, remember?”
Sawyer’s jaw ticked. “Yes, I know.”
“And you brought me enough fuel to last weeks.”
“I remember that too.”
“But you’re here to check on me anyway.”
Sawyer chewed her cheek as if she were mulling over an answer, but Nellie had not asked a question.
The rain arrived sideways and hit the porch railing hard.
Sawyer was barely even blinking. Something had morphed in her features.
She did not wear the indifferent, superior neutrality she usually wore to every occasion as though it were part of the dress code.
Instead, all the stiffness seemed to have drained out of her, as if it were following the water dripping onto her toes.
Her pale eyes were wide, raw and unguarded in a way Nellie had never quite seen them before.
She looked almost undone again, the way she’d looked on the ridge, except wetter and more defeated, like whatever she’d been working through in the intervening twenty-four hours had finally deposited her here on this porch as its only possible conclusion.
“Yes,” Sawyer said. “I am.”
Nellie nodded wordlessly. Two thoughts showed up simultaneously and attempted to occupy the same space, which wasn’t ideal.
The first was that Sawyer Alburn driving forty-five minutes through a blackout in torrential rain to check on her was the most quietly devastating thing anyone had done for her in recent memory.
The second was that Sawyer Alburn had kissed her back on a ridge only a day ago and walked back into the forest like it had meant nothing.
For a woman who got her eight hours of sleep a night like her life depended on it, Nellie was tired—genuinely, bone-deep tired—of trying to figure out what the hell was going on every time this woman appeared.
Despite all this, she stepped back. “Come inside. You’ll catch your death.”
Sawyer stood awkwardly in the middle of the cottage’s single front room while Nellie went and got a towel, which took longer than it should have because she’d put them all in the wrong place after last week’s laundry, and by the time she returned, Sawyer was dripping quietly onto the flagstones with her hands in her pockets and her eyes tracking a curious circle from the tiny corner kitchen to the paper-laden dining table to the sagging couch and glowing wood-burner.
Nellie handed her the towel. “Have a seat.”
Sawyer dabbed at her face and hair, not sitting. The storm pressed against the windows.
“I saw the lights go out right across Phoenix Ridge,” she murmured.
“The whole grid?”
“As far as I could see.”
Nellie settled herself in the corner of the couch, tucked her feet up, and wished she had brewed another cup of tea just for something to do with her hands. Sawyer remained a somewhat supernatural looking, a dripping statue in the middle of the room.
Nellie rolled her eyes. “I need to say something.” The words came out more clipped than she’d been expecting them to. She’d have preferred to have scripted it or at least run it past her internal committee a few more times, but the committee had apparently adjourned without informing her.
“Alright,” Sawyer said slowly, folding the towel and hanging it over the back of a dining chair.
“You kissed me. That first time, when I twisted my ankle, you kissed me. I didn’t imagine that.”
“You didn’t.”
“And then you acted like it hadn’t happened.”
Sawyer didn’t answer, which was its own answer.
“Then last week… Last week Gina authorized the boundary expansion and moved the markers without telling you, and then you showed up here at ten at night to tell me you didn’t know anything about it. And you reset the boundary, and I believed you. I still believe you. But—”
“Nellie—”
“I’m not finished.” Nellie blew out a frustrated sigh.
She was, she discovered, actually angry, which was less complicated than the other things she’d been feeling all day and considerably easier to speak from.
“On the ridge, you said you were lost. You said you felt out of your depth every time you saw me. You let me kiss you, you pulled me in.” She threw her hands in the air as if she were begging the heavens for any of it to make sense.
“And then you pushed me away again and just walked away.”
Sawyer crossed her arms. Whether it was a defensive move was yet to be determined. But she let Nellie speak.
“And tonight, you show up here, in a damn blackout, to check whether I’m alright.
Even though you could have called or emailed, and you knew I had a backup generator if the first one failed and I am quite obviously”—Nellie gestured at her own clearly-intact self—”alright.
” She sat up straighter on the couch cushions.
“So I’m asking you, are you here because you actually care, or have you just been running surveillance on me with better manners than Gina would be able to? ”
The silence that followed was long enough that Nellie started cataloguing the sounds behind it: rain on the roof, the hum of the generator, the creak and settle of the cottage framing under the wind.
Sawyer stood in the middle of the room with her arms folded and her jaw working and looked at nothing in particular. Then, finally, she looked at Nellie.
“I’m confusing myself,” she said. Not defensive.
Flat, factual, like she’d examined the situation from every angle, and this was what it had yielded.
“I can’t give you a clean argument because I don’t have one.
Everything I’ve done in the last few weeks has pointed in two different directions at once, and I’m aware of how that reads. ”
“Right,” Nellie agreed.
“The boundary—that was Gina, and I handled it. The planning application…” Sawyer pressed two fingers to her temple briefly.
“That was a decision I knew was coming, and I let it proceed before I fully realized what it would look like, and I am not entirely sure when understanding that changed what I was willing to do.”
“And the kissing?”
“And the kissing.” Sawyer’s chin came up. “I’m not apologizing for any of that.”
“I wasn’t asking you to apologize. I’m asking you to explain what it meant.”
“I pulled away on the ridge because… because I have a company with more than three thousand employees and a board that has been watching this Phoenix Ridge situation for months. I have a legal agreement with a timeline and a development project I’ve been building toward for three years.
And none of that”—her words seemed to catch in her throat—“none of it tells me what to do about the fact that I cannot stop thinking about you.”
Nellie’s heart behaved terribly. She told it to knock it off.