CHAPTER 21 – NELLIE #2
But seeing it didn’t stop her being angry about it.
“I don’t have an answer to that,” Sawyer admitted, quietly. “That’s not how companies work. They grow. They expand. They keep meeting demand. Alburn Systems is making advancements in tech infrastructure that benefit—”
“I don’t need the company spiel.”
“—that benefit millions of people. And employing thousands more. And I don’t understand why that’s supposed to be something I apologize for.”
“I’m not asking you to apologize for the jobs.
” Nellie’s voice was louder now; she registered the fact and did not dial it back.
“I’m not standing here saying your employees shouldn’t have jobs.
I’m asking you to care. About what it costs.
Not in money, not in press coverage, but what it costs the ground, the water table, the air.
The planet, Sawyer! The one we actually live on.
Which is dying, by the way, and not slowly anymore, and people like you—” She caught herself and started again.
“The kind of growth your company represents, and ten thousand companies like it, that’s not a side issue to the crisis.
That is the crisis. And I feel like I’ve been standing in the forest for seven weeks telling you that, and you’ve been kissing me, and it’s been—” She stopped.
She breathed.
“It’s been really nice,” she muttered, almost to herself. “But I think I might have convinced myself that meant you understood.”
The silence quickly grew thick, almost suffocating. Sawyer rubbed her temples.
It was a small, weary gesture, and Nellie observed it with a splinter of feeling she couldn’t name cleanly. Not sympathy, not impatience. Something thornier, a recognition that the tiredness was real, and that this was somehow the most infuriating thing about all of it.
“There is no point,” Sawyer finally said, “in continuing this particular argument. We will never agree on this. You don’t know what it’s like to run a company, to have a board breathing down your neck about profit margins, to have thousands of employees depending on the decisions you make from this desk every single day.
You can’t just walk into my office and tell me how to run it because you’ve…
” She trailed off as if she wasn’t entirely sure where she was going with that point, a malfunction that was so utterly unlike Sawyer Alburn.
“We’re never going to see eye to eye on this, Nellie.
I want you to be happy. I genuinely do. But I can’t restructure my expansion strategy around some climate change campaign, no matter whose it is. ”
Having a malfunction of her own, Nellie could only blink slowly.
She had a list, somewhere in the back of her mind, of things she admired about Sawyer Alburn.
It was a long list, annoyingly. It included: the directness, the sharp brain, the complete absence of performative humility, the way she listened even when she was pretending not to, the fact that she had driven forty-five minutes into the wilderness to deal with a problem in person rather than send a lawyer.
Nellie had not built that list in order to have it deployed against her in an argument, like ammunition, and yet here they were.
“Just some campaign…” Nellie repeated.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You absolutely did.” The heat behind her ribs was fully committed now, past the point of rational control.
“And that’s fine. If that’s what it is to you.
My little campaign. My tree situation. My feelings about the animals and the dirt, which you have heard approximately a hundred times and absorbed approximately none of.
Because absorption would require caring about it as a thing that actually matters rather than a charming eccentricity you find in the woman you’ve been fucking. ”
“Nellie—”
“No. Don’t!” Nellie was shouting now, the way she didn’t let herself in arguments with people she wasn’t willing to lose, and the fact that she was doing it told her something she didn’t particularly want to know about how much ground she’d already ceded.
“I’m not finished. I have been fighting against what you represent for my entire adult life, and I know that sounds dramatic and self-righteous, and I don’t care because it’s true!
I have chained myself to trees and written petitions nobody read and given speeches in county planning offices to rooms full of people who’d already made up their minds.
I have done this because it matters. Because the planet is dying, Sawyer, and it’s dying on an accelerating timeline, and the CEOs driving that acceleration don’t get to kiss me in their office and also tell me my life’s work is just some campaign they can’t restructure their strategy around!
” The last word cracked in her throat, which she hated, but she pressed through it.
“Who even are you? I feel like I’m talking to a soulless brick wall! ”
To her credit, Sawyer didn’t rise to any of it.
She just rubbed her temples, slow and steady. Her silence said the conversation was already over before it started.
Which was, in many ways, exactly the point.
Nellie picked up her bag from the chair she’d slung it over when Sawyer had invited her to sit behind the desk—a lifetime ago, a different chapter ago, when she’d walked around this room with her stomach full of giddy, warm pride.
She pulled the strap over her shoulder and looked at Sawyer one more time, just long enough to confirm that the ice had glazed over her eyes.
Then she left.
Nellie marched past Martha’s desk without turning her head. The elevator was at the far end of the hall. She raced toward it with her jaw set and her chest crammed full of something hot and stinging and nowhere near finished with her.
She jabbed the button with her thumb.
Nothing happened.
She jabbed it again. Again. A fourth time, a fifth, quick and hard, the button clicking beneath her fingertip with the same calm, mechanical indifference as everything else in this building.
This enormous glass building full of people who moved in straight lines and made their decisions from spreadsheets and called it being rational.
This building full of marble and chandeliers and thousands upon thousands of square feet of aggressively tasteful evidence that the world is run by people who had decided that expansion was the answer to every question, including the ones about what to do when there was nothing left to expand into.
She jabbed it a sixth time, a seventh, an eighth, a ninth, a tenth, and the pressure of it traveled up through her thumb and into her wrist and started to ache.
Finally, the elevator doors slid open.
Nellie stepped inside without looking back.