CHAPTER 22 – SAWYER
The elevator gave a final, mechanical chime somewhere down the corridor, and Sawyer sat very still in her leather chair and tried to focus on deep breathing.
She had, over the course of her career, navigated the exits of partners, CFOs, and two sitting board members who had attempted coups that hadn’t escalated.
She was not unfamiliar with the aftermath of a door swinging shut.
She knew the unique texture of the silence that came next—the way it sat in the air like something physical, thick and unhelpful, before she managed to take a sufficient breath and got back to work.
Watching Nellie walk away from her was something else entirely.
The air didn’t settle. Sawyer didn’t manage to take a breath she felt really reach her lungs.
All she could do was sit in it, let it fester minute after minute, until it became clear that it wasn’t getting better any time soon.
Then she reached across the desk and picked up the folder Gina had brought, with its cheerful rainbow of colored dividers. She opened it to the first tab.
Forty-two acres of partially logged scrubland outside Tucson.
Power access, road access, water table described as adequate, which was the real estate equivalent of calling a hotel room cozy.
There was a wildlife survey attached, conducted in March, two pages of it.
She flipped past without reading it and moved to the second tab.
A decommissioned industrial site in Tempe. The site remediation report was twenty pages long, which Gina had helpfully summarized in three bullet points. The third bullet point said, “favorable for development pending EPA Phase 2 clearance.” It was the pending that did it.
Third tab: land parcel in Queen Creek, seventy acres, agricultural rezoning in progress. The aerial photography showed what had, until recently, been someone’s farm. The creek in the lower quadrant was now an unnamed drainage channel in the survey notes.
Sawyer closed the folder.
She sat with it under her palm, stared out at the city through the glass, and replayed Nellie shouting at her about the water table and the air and the ground and the planet. How she’d slung “by the way” as though Sawyer were a truant schoolgirl who needed reminding of the rules.
By the time six o’clock rolled around, she’d made no progress on deciding where might be the least harmful place to build the infrastructure she’d promised her shareholders. All she knew was that she still hadn’t taken a full breath.
The drive to the cottage was one long brainstorming session for what the right words to fix all this could possibly be.
Sawyer was not the kind of person who rehearsed conversations—it was an amateur’s move, a way of loading expectations into an exchange that would immediately deviate from the script and leave you scrambling—but she organized points, which was different and wholly necessary.
She organized them with the same efficiency she brought to any business call: lead with the concession, establish the shared interest, steer toward a workable outcome.
She’d protected the forest. That was real.
That was permanent. The new sites in Gina’s folder weren’t old growth; they were scrubland and remediated industrial zones, and if Nellie would just hold still long enough to look at the actual specifications—
The gravel turnoff came up faster than she expected and she braked too hard. The car’s tires spat gravel, then settled.
Sawyer sat for a second with her hands on the wheel, squinting at the cottage.
The porch light was off.
She got out anyway, walked to the door, and knocked. The sound landed on a hollow quiet.
She tried the handle. Unlocked—she knew Nellie never locked it—and the door swung inward. Sawyer stood at the entrance while her eyes adjusted to the dark.
The table was clear. Every last mug. Every last pile of papers.
The windowsill where Nellie had always perched her seedling pots—three of them, little terracotta things she referred to by name—was bare, leaving three circular marks in the wood like shadows of objects that had been somewhere for a very long time.
The couch cushions were straightened as if the inhabitant was trying to clear the evidence of ever having been here.
The bathroom. The bedroom. Sawyer did a circuit in approximately thirty seconds and found nothing, room by empty room, except the lingering smell of woodsmoke in the curtains and a single woolen sock wedged behind the radiator that Nellie had clearly missed in her haste to disappear.
Sawyer picked it up. Stood in the bedroom holding it. And put it back down.
Then she went around to the back of the property, to the flat patch of grass where Dolores had spent the last seven weeks parked like a cheerfully permanent fixture, hubcaps crusted in mud, the curtains drawn across the windscreen in what Nellie had called “privacy mode” but was in fact just a dish towel clipped with a bulldog clip.
Nothing. Just the flattened rectangle of dead grass where the van’s undercarriage had blocked the light.
Gone, then.
Sawyer stood in the dark at the back of the empty cottage and felt that same silence from her office settle even heavier on her lungs.
It could have been hours before she trudged back to her car; it could have been minutes. The cottage seemed suspended in time without Nellie filling it.
She called Nellie’s number on the drive home and listened to it ring out.
She called again from her kitchen at 11 p.m., still in her work clothes, still holding the takeout container she’d bought and couldn’t remember eating.
Voicemail. She didn’t leave one. She wasn’t sure yet what the right words were, and she preferred not to say the wrong ones on record.
She called again in the morning.
And the morning after that.
The week had a grinding quality Sawyer hadn’t felt for two decades.
She went to the office. She ran the company.
She attended her scheduled calls and replied to correspondence and sat in the board meetings that had been calendared since January.
From the outside she was reasonably certain nobody had noticed anything amiss.
She was a precise, composed, functioning executive.
She ate lunch at her desk. She never mentioned Nellie.
Inside, she was doing something that, had she been willing to name it, she would have described as coming apart at the seams. She could not stop returning to it; not the argument, exactly, but the moment before the argument, when Nellie had climbed off her lap and gone very quiet and still.
The moment when something had pinched her face that wasn’t anger yet, just its precursor in the shape of doubt and disappointment.
Sawyer had seen it and had not moved to stop it.
Had instead reached for cool patience like a tool.
Had talked about boards and profit margins and the practical realities of running a company as though she were speaking to a group of student interns rather than…
Rather than Nellie.
Sharp desperation began to feel like needles in Sawyer’s chest when she reached Nellie’s voicemail again on the sixth day, the seventh, the eighth, and stopped keeping count somewhere around the tenth.
She had to grit her teeth against a sob each time she heard that greeting that sounded exactly like the Nellie she’d come to know: upbeat, slightly rushed, as though she’d recorded it between tasks and had three other things she was already thinking about.
“Hi, you’ve reached Nellie Fuller with the Wilderness Protection Alliance—”
Sawyer learned when exactly to hang up so that she could hear as much of that voice as possible before it got to the beep.
By the end of the second week, she went home and didn’t return to the office.
She stayed in her pajamas for five days.
This was not a decision she made so much as a circumstance she failed to reverse.
She woke up on Monday, stared at the ceiling for a while, and then pulled the sheets over her head.
Tuesday, same verdict. The treadmill collected a light film from disuse.
She didn’t care. She’d paid four thousand dollars for that treadmill, and she’d leave it to gather dust for as long as she liked; this was one of the few advantages of being a billionaire that she was currently in a position to access.
Martha came on Wednesday with more burritos.
She set them on the kitchen island without comment, brewed coffee without being asked, and left without ever once mentioning the company or the development project or Nellie Fuller, which was an act of restraint so extraordinary that Sawyer almost said something about it.
She came back Friday with more burritos. Still nothing about Nellie. Just the burritos, the coffee, and finally a brief and accurate summary of anything at the office that required Sawyer’s attention—she had excellent instincts for what could wait and what truly couldn’t—and then she left.
Sawyer ate the burritos. She watched three documentaries she’d had saved on her watchlist for a number of years, one of which spoke about deep-sea hydrothermal vents in a way that reminded her, absurdly, of something Nellie had said about the mycorrhizal network, so she turned it off and stared at the ceiling instead.
She thought about what Nellie had said. All of it.
Not the loud part; the loud part she’d been able to dismiss at the time, cataloguing it as an emotional spike rather than an argument, which was exactly what she would have done with anyone else who’d raised their voice in her office.
But there’d been a part before the loud part, when Nellie was standing at the edge of the desk with her hands on her hips, speaking at a flat, measured volume that, if anything, was harder to parry.
It’s not a change in what you’re doing. It’s a reroute.
Sawyer ran the sentence again.
And again.