CHAPTER 23 – NELLIE
The car that came up the dirt track had a dent in the front quarter panel and a bumper sticker that said BEES MATTER and Nellie felt, against her best judgment, enormously glad to see it.
She set down her book on rare mushrooms of eastern Asia and stood up from the rock she’d been using as a chair.
The Phoenix Ridge foothills stretched behind Dolores in both directions, scrubland and dry grass giving way to the long ridgeline of mountains against the sky.
It was the kind of landscape that rid the mind of any thoughts beyond pure awe.
Nellie had been finding this extremely useful.
Paloma pulled up, cut the engine, and hauled out two overflowing grocery bags.
“You look like you’ve been living in a ditch,” she said, by way of hello.
“A very scenic ditch, don’t you think?” Nellie took one of the bags from her and peered inside: oat milk, a block of dark chocolate, three kinds of crackers, pasta, and what appeared to be four individual cans of soup.
“I know what you eat when left unsupervised.”
“I’ve been eating fine—”
“Four kinds.” Paloma waggled a finger at her.
“Because you can’t get all the nutrients you need from cream of tomato soup.
” She looked at Dolores with the fond, vaguely appraising air she always brought to these visits, as though checking that the van hadn’t deteriorated.
Dolores was, as ever, parked with her nose pointed toward the mountains, dish towel clipped across the windscreen for privacy mode.
Nellie grinned at her safe haven. “Fancy a hot cocoa?”
It took her approximately ten minutes to boil water on the camp stove, locate the tin of cocoa powder she kept in the overhead cabinet, rinse out two mugs, and assemble something that was arguably hot chocolate if you didn’t mind lumps too much.
She handed Paloma a mug, and they unfolded the two camp chairs she kept bungee-corded to the back of Dolores and set them up facing the mountains.
“It’s good out here.” Nellie sighed, wrapping both hands around her mug.
Paloma looked at the ridgeline. “It is.”
“The air alone. You forget, in the city, that air is supposed to smell like this.” Nellie inhaled appreciatively.
Pine, somewhere up the slope. The dry, faintly animal sharpness of scrubland.
The particular smell that she always registered more in her lungs than her nose.
“I ran eleven miles yesterday. I started a new monitoring report on the migratory bird situation in this sector, just for fun. I’ve been sleeping eight hours. ”
Paloma sipped her cocoa.
“Good,” she said, somewhat pointedly.
Silence. Nellie knew that energy Paloma deployed when she had decided not to be the first one to say the actual thing.
“I’m fine,” Nellie added.
“I believe you.”
“I’m better than fine. I’m—”
“Nellie.” Paloma set her mug down on the flat rock between their chairs as if she was finally abandoning the whole charade.
“You’ve been here almost three weeks. You haven’t spoken to another soul.
I have been bringing you groceries because I know for a fact you’d survive on crackers for several days before you went back to civilization.
” She tilted her head and arched a dark eyebrow.
“I’m not here to make you feel bad about any of it.
I’m just pointing out that these are not the actions of someone who is fine. ”
A scrub jay landed on the rock with Paloma’s mug, flitting its gaze between the two of them as if it were watching a tennis match.
Nellie stared at the bird until it lost interest and flew away again. “I’m a disaster.” She sighed. “Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Paloma nodded and retrieved her mug, now ready to settle into the matter. “Tell me about it.”
“I guess I knew what I was getting into,” Nellie mumbled.
“That’s the thing. I’m not even— I can’t be angry about it, because I knew exactly what she was.
” She stretched her legs out in front of her, boots dusty, the knees of her hiking trousers stained green.
“I knew who she was before I ever walked into that office. She’s a cloud storage CEO who builds data centers.
That’s literally her whole job description.
I didn’t really expect anything different. ”
“Mm.”
“And I fell for her anyway.” She said it plainly because there was no version of this conversation in which she was going to be coy about it—not with Paloma, not at this point.
“I fell for her knowing that. I watched her be brilliant and complicated and occasionally infuriating, and I thought, ‘oh, well, this is probably fine, she’s difficult but—’” Nellie made a sound that was approximately a laugh. “And it was fine… up until it wasn’t.”
Paloma looked out over the ridge and chewed on the inside of her cheek. She’d spent the last three weeks, Nellie knew, working very hard to avoid saying I told you so, and the effort was visible.
“I know I don't have the right to be angry,” Nellie added.
Paloma snorted. “Why can’t we be angry at the people actively destroying our planet?”
“Well, okay, you’re right on that one. But I meant I don’t think I have the right to be angry at Sawyer when I knew who she was before I got emotionally invested, I guess.”
“Fair point.” Paloma nodded. “But you’re allowed to be disappointed. You’re not delusional for thinking that your relationship might have had an impact on Sawyer’s outlook.” She waved her hand at the view. “You’re not crazy for hoping she’d start to see the Earth through your eyes.”
Nellie watched the lumps of undissolved cocoa floating around in her drink. She’d spent almost three weeks trying to justify her own feelings to herself, to rationalize. Having Paloma put it all out there with straight logic was no small relief.
“So,” Paloma went on, clearly on a roll with the whole best-friend-spitting-facts shtick. “Are you really angry that Sawyer Alburn is carrying on with life, business as usual? Or are you actually just hurt that she didn’t prioritize your feelings enough to turn everything upside-down?”
“Well, shit, that’s a question and a half,” Nellie muttered.
The scrub jay came back. Sat on the same rock.
Tilted its head with the same curious expression.
Predictable. Nellie watched it and thought, not for the first time in the last eighteen days, that what she felt was something more complicated than either word really covered.
Anger she could work with, could channel into her campaign to save the planet.
Hurt implied injury, implied a wound she couldn’t close just with logic and a fierce pep talk.
What she actually felt was more like a jarring impact.
Like she’d run headfirst into something that was always going to be there, completely visible, and done it anyway, and now was knocked flat on her ass trying to work out what the hell she’d been thinking.
“Both,” she said. “Neither. I don’t know.
” She swirled the cocoa in her mug and drank it cold, grimacing slightly.
“I know that we had something real. I know that. I’m not confused about it.
Sawyer isn’t— People think she’s made of stone, but she’s not.
She’s made of something that just looks like stone until you get close enough to see it isn’t.
” She squinted at the horizon and shook her head.
“I’m just the idiot who got close enough. ”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“I’m a little bit of an idiot.”
“You’re a romantic optimist in an activist’s clothing.
” Paloma chuckled. “Which I know because I’ve watched you do it your entire adult life.
You see something worth protecting and you protect it, even when it’s complicated, even when the odds are bad.
” She inhaled a deep breath and blew it back out slowly.
“That’s not a flaw. It just doesn’t work out every time. ”
“And that’s where I’m at, I guess. It just won’t work out this time.
I don’t know how to be with someone when we’re going to be at each other’s throats about the thing that matters most to me.
Because she’s going to keep building, and I’m going to keep fighting, and eventually one of us is going to look at the other across that line and realize that love isn’t actually enough to fix a fundamental—”
Nellie caught herself.
The word had come out before she could stop it. She heard it land between them in the dry mountain air and couldn’t take it back, and also, she realized, she didn’t particularly want to.
Paloma said nothing for a long moment. Then, “Well…”
“I know.” Nellie groaned.
“That’s...”
“It’s incredibly inconvenient.”
“Damn right it is.” Paloma uncurled herself from the camp chair and stood, stretching her arms above her head.
Her shadow fell long and thin across the dirt track like some looming spirit came to walk with Nellie through ghosts of romances past. “I think you’re right about the fundamental incompatibility.
And I also think it’s one of the hardest things in the world, to admit that two people can develop real, genuine”—she glanced at Nellie—“love for each other and still be the wrong fit. That the feelings are true and the timing and the context and the basic facts of who you both are can still just…not work.” She dropped her arms. “There’s no one to blame for that.
It’s just a tragedy, really, when it happens. ”
Nellie folded her arms and pouted at the mountains. “You’re supposed to be making me feel better.”
“I’m helping you process.” Paloma crouched beside her best friend’s chair.
“Which is a different thing, and in my experience leads to actually feeling better eventually, rather than just temporarily less bad.” She planted a kiss on Nellie’s cheek and laid her head on her shoulder.
“You’re going to be okay. You know that, right? ”
“Yeah,” Nellie said. She meant it. She’d been out here long enough to know she wasn’t broken, just rearranged somewhat.
Something had cracked in her chest and hadn’t quite settled back into its original position yet, but she was not, she was fairly confident, catastrophically damaged.
She had the mountains. She had the birds.
And she had four kinds of soup courtesy of the best person she knew.
“Come back to the city,” Paloma urged.
“No.”
“Just for a week. Stay with me.”
“I’ll come back eventually. I just—” Nellie tilted her head back.
The sky above the mountains was the blue that only happened at this altitude, too saturated to be real, like someone had turned the contrast up.
“I need this to be where I am right now. If I look at a skyscraper, I’ll scream.
That’s not hyperbole, Pal, I’ll genuinely—”
She almost jumped out of her seat when her phone rang. Paloma fell back into the dirt.
Nellie had turned it back on this morning, which was either progress or a mistake; the jury was still out. She looked at the screen.
Martha Chen.
Nellie’s first reaction was a small, involuntary yelp. Her second was curiosity, because she had seen dozens of missed calls from Sawyer, but not once had the CEO asked her assistant to reach out.
“It’s Sawyer’s assistant.”
Nellie and Paloma simply stared at the phone. It kept ringing.
The thing was, Martha wasn’t Sawyer. Martha calling wasn’t Sawyer calling, which meant it also wasn’t the kind of minefield that picking up Sawyer’s calls had seemed, that Nellie had been avoiding, that she was not ready for, not yet, maybe not for a long time.
But Martha was different. She felt safer, more neutral maybe.
Nellie answered the call. “Hi, Martha.”
“Nellie. I’m sorry to call out of the blue. I thought you should know what’s happening at the company.”
Nellie sat forward in the camp chair. Beside her, Paloma took a seat on the rock and leaned in to eavesdrop.
“What could possibly be happening that has anything to do with me?”
“Sawyer called a board meeting this morning and announced that Alburn Systems is changing its entire development strategy.” Martha rattled off the details in quick succession, as if she was nervous she might not have much time to talk undisturbed.
“Renewable energy focused. A full environmental audit of the company’s existing footprint.
She’s pulling projects that don’t align with the new vision. ”
Nellie said nothing. She was not sure she was capable of saying anything. She simply gaped.
“Nellie?”
“I’m here. I just… I didn’t… She didn’t tell me she was even thinking any of this.”
“No.” Martha sighed. “None of us knew what she was planning. She’s been absent from the office.”
Nellie raised her eyebrows at that but decided it wasn’t the time to dwell on it.
“Gina Marsh disagreed with the direction. Strongly. She called for a vote of no confidence in her leadership.”
“She what?”
“The vote hasn’t happened yet. It can’t proceed until the other board members agree to it even going to the floor. That’s where things stand right now, as of this afternoon.”
Scrubbing her free hand over her face, Nellie tried to practice some meditative breathing. “Martha, why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’ve worked for Sawyer for almost eleven years, and I have never once seen her walk into a board meeting without knowing exactly what she was going to say and exactly how the room was going to receive it.
She knew this morning what she was walking into.
I thought you should know that she did it anyway, and I’m sure both of us have an idea as to why. ”
They wrapped up the call, and. Nellie lowered the phone slowly to her knee.
“What did she say?” Paloma had her chin in both hands, having been watching one side of the entire exchange with rapt attention.
“Sawyer is transitioning Alburn Systems toward entirely renewable energies.”
“Well, that’s—”
“Don’t.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say!”
“Whatever it is, I can’t hear it right now.”
Nellie pressed her palm over Paloma’s mouth, and then the other over her own.
Not laughing, definitely not laughing. Because there was nothing funny about the fluttering in her stomach, which was nothing like hurt and nothing like anger and was in fact the thing she most wished wasn’t happening to her.
Not that she could have stopped it if she’d tried.