CHAPTER 17 – NELLIE
The balloons arrived first.
There were ten of them, each a different shade of pink, and they made it through the cottage doorway only after a sustained operational effort involving Paloma twisting sideways and swearing at them under her breath in both English and Spanish.
They immediately formed a cheerful, bobbing congregation against the low beamed ceiling.
Behind them came Paloma herself, red-cheeked from the cold and grinning, cradling a white bakery box in both arms with a bottle of Malbec pinched under each elbow and a third swinging from two fingers.
“Happy birthday to my favorite ecological menace!” she announced, kissing Nellie once on each cheek.
“You brought balloons.” Nellie chuckled.
“I brought ten balloons. One for each year I’ve been better-looking than you.
” Paloma deposited the cake box and the wine bottles on the dining table with a decisive thump, turned, and looked around the cottage in a slightly clinical sweep Nellie immediately recognized as a welfare inspection.
The scattered survey maps, the empty mugs abandoned across every surface, the fleece draped over the back of a dining chair that had not made it back to the hook in approximately eleven days.
Her gaze finished its circuit on Nellie, and her dark eyes immediately narrowed. “You look tired.”
“I am aging,” Nellie hedged with a wry grin.
“No, I mean it. I haven’t seen you like this since Oregon. Are you getting any sleep at all?”
Nellie considered this at length. “The sleep thing could be better…”
Paloma pointed at a chair with a tsk. “Sit down. I’m opening the first bottle.”
Nellie sat. The balloons drifted like a pink cloud above the dining table, and Nellie watched them while Paloma navigated the small kitchen like she owned the place.
Soon enough, she’d identified which drawer held the corkscrew and which held four years of knotted rubber bands and broken cable ties.
Two glasses appeared. The cork popped out.
Paloma poured with brisk, agenda-driven generosity, set the glass in front of Nellie, and dropped into the opposite chair.
“Okay,” she said. “Talk.”
“About anything in particular?”
“Your face has been saying things since I walked in. It’s giving I have done something and I can’t decide if I’m happy about it.
” Paloma picked up her own glass and sat back.
“And the last time your face looked like that, you’d chained yourself to a logging road gate and only told me four days later. ”
Nellie turned her wine glass in both hands.
She’d spent approximately two hours this afternoon doing low-level mental rehearsal for this conversation, and in every version of it, the disclosure had come out with considerably more preamble and strategic framing.
In the version she’d planned, she’d opened with a thorough context-setting overview of how everything had unfolded—the storm, the power cut, the knock on the door—before arriving, gently, at the part that was going to give Paloma palpitations.
Instead, she blurted out, “I slept with Sawyer.”
If Paloma’s eyes had bugged out any further, they would have plopped onto the table.
“Sawyer Alburn?”
“I am not aware of any other Sawyers in the vicinity.”
“Nellie.” Paloma pinched the bridge of her nose. “You mean to tell me you had sex with the Sawyer Alburn—the billionaire? Who owns several skyscrapers in Phoenix Ridge? Who owns the cloud-sharing tech that pretty much every office in the country uses, including mine? Who owns this forest?”
“I suppose she does own a lot of stuff. What’s your point?”
“A billionaire!” Paloma pressed both palms flat on the table as though stabilizing it against an oncoming impact. “You got naked with the billionaire CEO who is trying to bulldoze this ancient forest you love so she can build a fucking data center!”
“Well, it’s—it’s more complicated than that. I think I’ve been getting through to her, she’s actually been—”
“Oh no.” Paloma pointed at her best friend, birthday or no birthday. “Do not tell me she’s been different lately. Do not tell me she’s been coming around. I need you to hear yourself right now, Nellie Fuller.”
Nellie chewed on her lip.
“She drove out here in the storm,” she mumbled weakly. “To check on me. And she’s been really accommodating with my investigation. And Gina’s the one who—”
“I know about Gina. Gina being awful doesn’t make Sawyer a hero.
” Paloma sighed into her wine glass and took a long swallow.
“I’m not saying she’s evil. I’m saying she’s the CEO of a company with millions of dollars tied up in a building project that you are the main obstacle to.
I’m saying that a really smart CEO would understand that you having feelings for her is very useful right now. ”
“Pal.”
“I’m saying it because I love you.”
“I know you are.” Nellie did know. That was, unfortunately, the irritating part. “And you’re not wrong that it’s complicated. I just— She’s not running a play, Pal. I know what that looks like, and this isn’t it.”
“Maybe.” Paloma turned her glass slowly.
“But even if everything you feel is real, and everything she feels is real, you’re still two people who want completely different things.
Who see the world in completely different ways.
Feelings don’t resolve that. You can’t assume that she’s going to become an eco-warrior just because you’re sleeping together. That’s not how it works.”
Nellie knew that too. That was also, unfortunately, the irritating part.
“I guess you have a point there,” Nellie muttered.
“Chica.” Paloma leaned forward. “Let’s talk about something else. Billionaires and bulldozers will still be an issue tomorrow. It’s your birthday. You’re supposed to be happy!”
“I am happy.”
“You look like you’re questioning all your life choices.”
“Doesn’t everyone question their life choices on their birthday?” Nellie snorted into her wine glass, taking a large gulp and reaching for the bottle.
“Only when they’re hella drunk and nervous about the hangover!
But I can think of one choice you definitely never regret.
Cake.” Paloma stood up, went to the bakery box, and opened it with ceremony.
Inside sat a chocolate cake with dark ganache frosting and presumably (Nellie didn’t count them) thirty-five candles arranged in a ring.
“You can be all glum and reflective in January, like the rest of us. Tonight you eat cake and you drink wine and you tell me all about your salamanders.”
“They’re not my salamanders.”
“They are absolutely your salamanders, and you love them.” Paloma was already rooting through the kitchen drawer again for a lighter.
Nellie watched her and felt a warm sensation in her chest, that feeling of being hugged from the inside that only Paloma could produce.
Ten years of showing up for every chaotic chapter, not because the chapters were easy but because she didn’t believe in choosing convenient times to be a best friend.
The old, mostly empty lighter ignited on the third attempt.
The candles went up in bright, flickering flames that made the kitchen smell like a birthday.
Paloma carried the cake to the table like a reverent priestess bearing an offering, set it in front of Nellie, and stood back to admire her handiwork.
“Make a wish,” she chirped.
Nellie looked at the flames. Thirty-five of them, which was, all things considered, not an inconsequential number of birthday candles to blow out in a single breath at the end of a day that had involved four hours on a creek transect and an arguably ill-advised amount of emotional turmoil.
She thought about what she wanted. The list assembled itself without much prompting and was, predictably, topped by something she had absolutely no right to put in front of the universe yet.
She blew.
Twenty-nine out. A second breath took the final six. Paloma clapped once and went back to the wine.
“What did you wish for?”
“Can’t tell you.” Nellie smiled privately at the thin smoke curling from the wicks. “Otherwise it won’t come true.”
By the second bottle, the best friends had settled into their natural rhythm: the one they found reliably after the serious portion of the evening had concluded and they were back in safe, well-mapped territory.
Paloma had stopped looking worried. Or rather, she’d filed the worried face in its usual place for later retrieval, which was how she operated; she could be genuinely afraid for you and still decide, pragmatically, that additional wine was the correct intervention for the moment.
“Come on, tell me about your report,” she demanded again. She’d dragged Nellie over to the couch by this point, and pulled her feet up under her, wine glass propped on her knee.
Nellie lit up.
She couldn’t help it. Her face did the thing it did every time someone opened the door to this particular topic.
It was a sort of involuntary animation, like a light switching on behind her eyes, which Paloma had once described as the big tree face and which Nellie maintained was a completely normal and professional expression of scientific enthusiasm.
“I’m almost done,” she announced. “Another week, maybe.” She unfolded herself from the couch corner and reached across the coffee table for her site map, because she could never discuss the riparian corridor without pointing at things.
“Look. The whole northern quadrant—this section here, running along the main channel—functions as a connected wildlife corridor between two habitat patches that everyone thought were isolated. Which means anything moving between the upper slope and the lowland wet areas is using this creek as a throughway. Small mammals, amphibians, probably a few bat species I haven’t confirmed yet. ”
“Bats?”
“Bats are essential, Paloma.”