CHAPTER 19 – NELLIE
The submit button was a blue rectangle so ordinary that Nellie had clicked a thousand of its identical twins without ceremony: online grocery orders, grant applications, the online form she filled out when she thought she’d lost her library card, which she’d found in her sports bra twenty minutes later.
This one was an entirely different beast. She clicked it anyway.
The screen blinked once, replaced by a green confirmation banner that read, “Your submission has been received,” and Nellie stared at it for so long that her eyes started to sting.
Seven days ahead of the deadline.
She pushed back from the kitchen table—which was also her desk, also the survey map depository, also the surface upon which she’d eaten probably more than a hundred meals since moving into the cottage—and let out a long, slow breath that had been building in her rib cage for the better part of seven weeks.
Then she picked up her coffee, found it cold, and drank it anyway.
She was celebrating. Cold coffee was celebratory.
The report was twenty-seven pages. Sixteen data tables.
Three annotated distribution maps. A photographic appendix with enough documentation of old-growth indicators to make even the most determinedly jaded federal reviewer sit up a little straighter.
She had written the riparian corridor section four times because it was the corridor that mattered, the corridor that connected everything.
The narrow green thread of hydrology and root systems and inter-species dependency that would take two centuries to rebuild if it was razed and replaced with steel and concrete infrastructure.
She had written and rewritten it until it was exactly as compelling as the thing it was describing, and now it was out of her hands.
Nellie Fuller, ecologist, van-dweller, and committed thorn in the side of corporate America, had done her job.
She glanced at her phone out of the corner of her eye and debated for a few minutes, trapped in a maelstrom of pride mixed with guilt mixed with longing mixed with uncertainty.
She wanted to tell Sawyer, but she wanted to tell the Sawyer who had stayed the night barely a week ago, the Sawyer who had kissed her skin and whispered sweet—actually, pretty dirty—nothings in her ear.
Nellie wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to tell the CEO of Alburn Systems that she believed she had successfully foiled her expansion plans in Phoenix Ridge. That Sawyer was unlikely to pat her on the head and praise her job well done.
A cheeky-somewhat-smug voicemail felt like the safest route at this juncture.
The last one had yielded such satisfying results, she was hoping they could start something of a habit.
It was midmorning, anyway, so Nellie figured Sawyer was probably in meetings or knee-deep in paperwork or whatever it was billionaire CEOs did with their days cooped up in their ivory towers.
Sucking in a nervous breath, Nellie clicked on Sawyer’s contact and mentally rehearsed a few lines she thought might sound appropriately nonchalant.
Much to her surprise, on the third ring, the line clicked open.
“Hey, you.” It seemed a chipper voicemail was not in their fate today.
Nellie opened her mouth to say something witty and instead produced a sound in the general vicinity of oop.
“Oop? What’s that supposed to mean? Did you dial the wrong person?” Sawyer asked. She sounded both amused and mildly unsurprised, which was perhaps the most accurate way to receive anything Nellie did.
“No, no, I just thought I’d get your voicemail. I had a whole speech prepared,” Nellie admitted, clumsily recovering. “It was very good. Real crowd-pleaser. You’ve ruined it by not being outrageously busy like you’re supposed to be.”
“Tragic. What did I ruin?”
“Only my smug monologue about how I’ve submitted my report, seven days ahead of schedule, with enough ecological documentation to bury a development project the size of a city block, and how deeply, profoundly sorry not sorry I am for being an absolute nightmare to deal with ever since you found me chained to that tree.
” Nellie propped her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand.
“It was going to end with a mic drop or something. Really commit to the bit.”
“Ah, you finished your report.” Nellie couldn’t quite tell if Sawyer sounded disappointed or relieved, and the tone danced on the edge of professionalism. “This morning?”
“Just a few minutes ago. I’ve been staring at it since seven am thinking about how I should probably eat something before I become one with the furniture.
” She glanced around at the scattered notebooks, the empty survey roll, the cold coffee.
“The mess in this cottage is extraordinary. I think the papers have been breeding.”
“You don’t keep a very tidy office, that’s for sure.” Sawyer chuckled. “You should come and see mine.”
“Your office?”
“Yes, come to Alburn Systems. Now. We should make it official. Close of the development project, end of the deal. An official meeting, Nellie. Come and have an official meeting with me.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not...”
“I’m being deadly serious, Nellie. I want you to come here.”
“To your skyscraper?”
“One of them, yes.”
“The—” Nellie chewed her lip, already sitting up straighter, already looking around for her jacket. “The enormous glass one. The one right in the middle of the business district that I’ve spent years looking at and thinking, that’s where the enemy lives.”
“I live in a different skyscraper, not in my office. But yes. That’s the one.”
In a daze, Nellie found her jacket, which was hanging off the back of the couch where she’d flung it last and had a pencil she’d been looking for since Tuesday shoved through the collar. She extracted the pencil, in an effort to look slightly more professional for her business meeting.
“Right. Yeah. Okay. Official meeting. I’ll be there in—” She looked down at herself. Her cream fleece had a grass stain on the left sleeve that she had no memory of acquiring. Her jeans had a small rip in the knee that had been there for years. Her boots were, as always, boots. “Give me an hour.”
“Take your time.” Sawyer chuckled.
“I’m not wearing a blazer,” Nellie told her. In all honesty, there wasn’t anything in her closet that would be much of an improvement on what she was wearing right now, if only perhaps something with fewer stains.
“I didn’t expect you to.”
“Just so that’s clear.”
“Crystal clear. See you in an hour.”
The Phoenix Ridge financial district had been designed by someone with a strong conviction that width was an imposition on humanity.
Everything was sleek and vertical. Tower after glass tower in stacked planes of silver and gray, each one angled to catch the light and return it amplified, so that the whole area glittered.
Nellie was not, as a general rule, a person who found glass and steel spiritually stirring, but she’d grant that the Alburn Systems building was its own category of extravagance.
She stood on the pavement and squinted up at it.
And up.
And up.
Forty floors of reflective glass. A lobby she could see through the revolving doors from here, marble so pale it looked frozen, and something hanging above the reception desk that it took her a moment to process as a chandelier.
It was steel, or something close to it: an enormous lattice of interlocking angular forms, suspended from the ceiling by cables.
It was the most aggressively corporate art installation Nellie had ever seen, which she appreciated on a purely anthropological level, in the way that you might appreciate a specimen jar.
Nellie shouldered her bag, sidestepped a man in a three-piece suit who did not break stride, and pushed through the revolving door.
The lobby hit her like a different climate.
The ceiling was high enough that she spent a disoriented second recalibrating her sense of interior scale.
The marble floor—she’d been right about the color, somewhere between cloud and glacier—reflected back the steel chandelier in a long, faint ghost of itself, doubling the installation into something almost organic, the way root systems mirrored their canopy from underground.
She registered this observation and immediately understood that she was the only person in this lobby who was looking up rather than ahead, because everyone else was moving with the brisk, purposeful directness of people who saw this particular stretch of marble every single day and experienced it with approximately the same wonder as their own hallways.
At the far end of the lobby, a long, curved desk in pale wood and chrome held court beside a row of electronic entrance gates, attended by two receptionists in matching charcoal.
One was on a call. The other, a woman perhaps in her thirties with a blow-out so architectural it constituted a structural element in its own right, looked up as Nellie approached.
The look she performed in the following three seconds was a complete assessment—head to toe, boots to braid—delivered with such professional efficiency that Nellie almost admired it.
She clocked the loose thread at the hem of Nellie’s sweater.
The wrinkled cargo pants. The canvas bag with the WILDERNESS PROTECTION ALLIANCE patch beginning to detach at one corner.
Her expression reset into a kind of cool neutrality that was, technically, polite, but felt like razorblades against Nellie’s skin.
“Good morning. How can I help you?”
“Hi.” Nellie’s hand got halfway to a wave before she realized it probably wouldn’t seem like normal conduct. “I’m here for a meeting. With Sawyer Alburn.”
The receptionist’s expression didn’t change, exactly—nothing so rude as a sneer—but something around the eyes performed a very small recalibration. Her gaze dropped once more, briefly, to Nellie’s outfit.