CHAPTER 16 – SAWYER
Sawyer woke up reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
Her arm was already extended across the other half of the bed before full consciousness arrived to inform her how foolish this was.
The sheets on that side were flat, cool, undisturbed—the perfect record of a night she had spent alone.
The ceiling of her cavernous bedroom taunted her with its usual clean, expensive indifference.
Nothing like a certain cottage with low oak beams and considerably more coziness.
Sawyer withdrew her arm and lay staring at it.
Six years since she’d last wanted to reach for someone in the morning.
She hadn’t missed it—or told herself as much on the occasions when it crossed her mind, which were fewer and further between than most people probably assumed.
She’d built plenty to be proud of in those six years.
Her company was thriving. Her ten-million-dollar penthouse apartment was quiet. Her schedule was hers. She slept well.
Yet, these days, she was not, in fact, sleeping well.
She’d been awake at 1:00 a.m. At 2:30. Briefly, disastrously, at 3:15, when she’d gotten up and answered three emails just to have something purposeful to do with herself.
She had returned to bed at 3:40 and lain there constructing arguments for why leaving the cottage last night had been reasonable and necessary and the correct thing to do, which was a project that had failed every iteration she’d tried.
Sawyer pressed the heels of her hands against her closed eyes and reviewed the evidence.
Last night, she had driven forty-five minutes through a thunderstorm, stood on Nellie Fuller’s porch soaking wet hoping to be let in, had sex on an overstuffed couch that was frankly not engineered for such a feat, and then—in what her own conscience was now cataloguing in stark terms—dressed herself, cited professional obligations, and driven home.
At 11:30 p.m.
In the rain.
Because she had a lot to catch up on.
She moved her hands from her eyes and surveyed the ceiling again. It had not become any more comforting in the slightest.
The problem, as Sawyer could admit to herself in the privacy of this room and approximately nowhere else, was not the leaving.
She’d needed to leave. Not because of the work, but because staying would have required her to lie there in the dark next to Nellie and feel everything at once without any kind of plan for what to do with it.
She had no timeline, no pros and cons list, no executive decision framework for how to reconcile her emotions with the very real, very expensive threat that Nellie Fuller posed to her company.
So, she had left. Which was, her conscience now observed with its infuriating frankness, still cowardice regardless of how carefully she articulated the reasoning.
Sawyer muttered a few curses to the ceiling and got up.
The city below was doing its early-morning thing as if the storm last night had never happened—towers lit once more against a gray sky, traffic threading in slow parallel lines forty floors down.
Sawyer stood at the window with a coffee she didn’t remember making and watched it.
She’d stood here after every major crisis the company had weathered over the past three years: the Class C lawsuit in 2024, the data breach the following winter, the fourteen months when the board had been one bad quarter away from a no-confidence vote.
She’d stood here and calculated. Made lists.
Mapped all the angles until the path forward showed itself with unmistakable clarity.
She thought about Nellie Fuller’s face in the firelight. About the specific sound she’d made when—
Right. Calculating.
She had a company with more than three thousand employees who relied on her for a stable paycheck.
A company she had spent half her life building using the same instincts her father had told her would amount to nothing, in a field that had told her she wouldn’t last a year.
She had a development plan that would span the next twenty years of her life, if it played out the way she intended.
And she had absolute authority to dictate when, how, and why Alburn Systems did anything.
None of that, she now understood, needed to include cutting down a forest that didn’t need to be cut down.
She’d known it for longer than she cared to admit. She’d felt the realization creep up on her with every step she’d watched Nellie take through that forest with pure excitement and wonderment plastered across her face, and Sawyer had felt the irksome discomfort of recognizing she was the problem.
She’d felt it last night, lying there on that terrible, wonderful couch with Nellie’s warmth at her shoulder, and had gotten up and put her damp jacket on as a result.
The coffee was going cold. The city went about its business below. Sawyer made a decision.
She was going to let Nellie win.
Not in a press release, not in a legal concession she’d have to spin for the board, not in any way that required her to perform some public conversion of character.
She was simply going to stop the Phoenix Ridge development and find somewhere else to build.
The world had no shortage of flat, treeless parcels she could build her data center on.
Gina could locate one within a month if Sawyer put the right kind of pressure on her, which she was very good at.
The board would object. Gina would object. Sawyer could handle both.
What she couldn’t handle was Nellie Fuller standing between her and her own construction equipment anymore, looking at her with those patient, infuriatingly gorgeous eyes and explaining something about rare salamanders as if Sawyer were someone worth educating.
All of the knots needed untangling, then she’d finally be able to breathe again.
Gina was in her office by nine-fifteen, which was less a testament to her punctuality than to the fact that Martha had apparently delivered the summons in a tone that didn’t invite discussion.
Gina came in carrying a leather portfolio and wearing the look she always wore when Martha’s summons had given nothing away—jaw set, eyebrows raised a little too high to really portray innocence, the slight forward lean that said her defense was assembled and ready.
Sawyer knew the expression well. Sawyer had put it on her face before.
“You wanted to see me.” Gina sat down across from her without being asked. Points for confidence, she supposed.
“I did.” Sawyer leaned back in her chair. “I want you to start looking for alternative sites for the Phoenix Ridge data center. Flat land, existing infrastructure access, no deforestation required.”
Gina’s mock-innocent eyebrows descended slowly before gathering in the middle in a deep frown.
She stared at the pen in her hand and spun it a few times between her fingers.
This was a tell of hers Sawyer had learned years ago: it meant she was buying exactly one second in which to decide whether to argue.
“That’s an eighty-four million dollar project you’re packing up and moving out,” she said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“The permits took fourteen months.”
“I know how long they took, Gina. I was here.”
Gina sat back, folded her hands across her stomach, and nodded slowly.
This was yet another tell, one that she deployed when she thought Sawyer was wrong but knew better than to say so immediately.
Usually, Sawyer appreciated her holding her tongue.
This morning it made Sawyer want to shake her and skip to the part where Gina said what she actually meant.
“This is quite the diversion,” Gina finally said. “The board is going to ask me where it came from.”
“I will deal with the board.”
“Sawyer—”
“Gina.” She spoke with just enough venom to warn her off. “I’m not asking you to explain my reasoning to the board. I’m asking you to find me a site. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them is yours.”
“Where is this coming from?”
She blinked once. “My decision-making authority.”
Gina pressed her together. Then she shifted forward in the chair, placed her hands on the edge of Sawyer’s desk, and tried a different tactic.
Gina had always been better at pivoting than persisting, which was one of the reasons Sawyer had hired her and also, currently, one of the reasons she was mildly annoying.
“I hear you. But you’ve got three years sunk into this site.
The grid connection’s already been scoped.
Macmillan’s team did the civil survey last spring.
If we pull out now, we’re looking at eight million in stranded costs before we even start the conversation about the replacement timeline. ”
“I know what we’re looking at.”
“Do you?” It came out with a fraction more accusation than she’d probably intended, and Sawyer watched her register that, and recalibrate immediately.
Gina softened her voice, which was almost worse.
“It’s not just the capital expenditure. The board has been restless since this save the trees campaign started getting traction.
There are two directors who’ve been making noise about the PR situation for weeks.
If they see us abandoning the build because some activist with a clipboard has—”
“Gina.”
Her voice was quiet. She was giving her too many warnings.
She heard it, hesitated, and then pressed on anyway.
“You’re too smart to let this derail you.
That’s all I’m saying. You did not build this company on sentiment.
The Phoenix Ridge land was a clean acquisition, we were operating in full compliance, and this new survey is a manageable liability.
Whatever’s tugged at your heartstrings in the last few weeks to make you feel differently—”
“I’m going to stop you there.”
Sawyer stood up. She wasn’t going to pace; she never paced, it gave the other person too much to read.
She walked around her desk, unhurried, and leaned against the front of it with her arms folded, looking at Gina from two feet away.
Gina had to look up at her slightly, a fact Sawyer hoped would remind her of her place.
“Let me be clear about something.”
Gina held very still.
“I know how to run this company. I built it long before you were a name on an application, and I’ll be running it long after this conversation.
The instincts you’re currently worried about are the same ones that got you a salary in the top point-five percent of your field, so I’d encourage you not to second-guess them too enthusiastically.
” She opened her mouth. Sawyer kept going.
“And second, if you use the word sentiment to me again in this office or imply that any decision I make is the result of something that’s been tugged”—she spat the word out with full contempt—”I will invite you to see yourself out and revise your resumé at your earliest convenience. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” Gina said tightly.
“Good.” Sawyer moved back behind her desk, sat down, and pulled her keyboard toward her as if the matter had just concluded on entirely reasonable and collegial terms. “New sites. One week. Five options minimum, with preliminary infrastructure assessments and a land acquisition cost comparison. Not agricultural land, not anything with a prior conservation designation. Something clean, something we can move quickly on, and something that won’t require me to have this conversation again. ”
Gina stood. She had a slightly stunned look, as if she’d come in primed for a skirmish and taken a clean defeat instead.
“One week.” Gina nodded, at the door. Sawyer could still hear the shape of the argument Gina had walked in with somewhere underneath it, packed away.
“Thank you, Gina.”
The door clicked shut.