CHAPTER 24 – SAWYER
Fundamentally predictable by nature, Josie Barfield ordered the duck.
Sawyer had eaten at Phoenix Ridge Country Club eleven times over the course of her career, and Josie had ordered the duck every single time, which told her several things about her: that she was a woman with zero interest in surprise, that she trusted the menu’s most expensive option, and that her appetite for novelty was approximately calibrated to the amount of personal risk she was willing to absorb in any given week.
In this way, Josie Barfield was entirely consistent.
Today Sawyer needed her to be inconsistent.
“You want to take on the renewable energy sector,” Josie said, something caught between disbelief and caution in her voice.
She’d cut a precise wedge from the duck breast before she spoke.
She appeared to have measured what she deemed the perfect bite.
“Not partner with it. Not hedge into it. You want to rebuild the infrastructure strategy around it.”
“That’s correct.”
“That’s not a pivot, Sawyer. That’s a demolition.”
“It’s a redirect.” She reached for her wine glass.
The sommelier had brought something obscene—she’d let Josie handle that since she always wanted to—and the pale gold of it caught the light slanting in through the dining room’s tall windows.
Outside, the eighteenth hole gleamed in early afternoon sun, empty and achingly manicured. “And I think it’s a necessary one.”
“Necessary.” Josie sat back slightly. She was sixty-one with thin silver hair.
She had made her first hundred million in commercial real estate, had sat on the Alburn Systems board for six years, and held more sway over every other board member’s vote than any of them would comfortably admit.
Getting Josie meant getting the room. Sawyer had known this since the day she’d invited her onto the board, and Sawyer had never wanted it to be true more acutely than right now.
“Gina used that word too. Necessary. In a rather different context.”
“Gina called a vote of no confidence because I withdrew a development site she had a vested interest in pursuing.” She set the glass down. “I’d call that a necessary clarification of priorities.”
Josie studied her potato fondant with a deep frown. “That’s a serious allegation.”
“It’s an observation. One I can document.” She smiled thinly. “But that’s not why we’re here.”
A waiter materialized, refilled their wine, and vanished silently. Josie resumed eating his duck without hurrying.
“Give me the pitch, then,” she mumbled around a mouthful. “I’ll hear you out, at least.”
Sawyer appreciated that about Josie. She always wanted to see every angle before she took any step. Part of why she was extraordinarily successful and useful.
“Alburn Systems currently operates nine data centers. We’re on track to build four more in the next five years. Each of those data centers, running at full capacity, will consume more electricity than a small city.” She paused for effect. “Not comparable to a small city. More than one.”
“Yes, yes, I’m aware of the energy consumption figures.”
“Then you’re aware that when we talk about renewable co-location—solar on-site, wind partnerships for grid supply—we’re not talking about a charitable gesture.
We’re talking about becoming energy-independent at scale.
No exposure to grid volatility. No exposure to energy price inflation, which has been running at eight percent year-on-year.
No liability under the incoming federal emissions frameworks, which Patricia’s committee should, frankly, already be losing sleep over.
” She let that point land with a slow sip of wine.
“The capital expenditure is higher upfront. The IRA tax credits over a six-year window bring the net cost to within twelve percent of conventional builds. Year eight we’re ahead. ”
Josie chewed. She was not a woman who rushed her thinking any more than she rushed her food.
“It’s not the financials I’m skeptical of,” Josie said. “I’ve read your summary. We all read it. The math is defensible.”
“Then what—?”
“It’s the reputational exposure.” Josie set down her fork with a small, deliberate clink.
“If Alburn Systems announces a full strategic pivot toward renewable energy, the market doesn’t read ‘forward-thinking leadership.’ The market reads ‘something went wrong.’ There are investors who will ask whether someone at the top lost their nerve. ”
Prepared for this argument, Sawyer regarded her steadily.
“Or… the market reads that the CEO of the most successful cloud infrastructure company in the country has decided, at the height of that success, to lead the sector somewhere it hasn’t been yet.
” She stabbed at her shrimp salad but didn’t take a bite.
“There’s a version of this story where we’re not playing defense, Josie.
There’s a version where Alburn Systems is the company that looked at the next thirty years and made a decision while everyone else was still staring at the next three.
There’s a version where we get to the table first.”
The smallest crease appeared above Josie’s brows. This was good. The crease meant she was considering something rather than simply deflecting.
“We have the technical capability to build infrastructure that most energy companies don’t have the expertise to construct,” Sawyer continued.
“We also have a climate crisis accelerating on a timeline that nobody in the sector has seriously engaged with from a first-mover position.” She kept her tone calm, her delivery clean; this was the version where she didn’t need to convince Josie she was right, only that being right would be profitable.
“We do this now, and we don’t get to be the company that eventually capitulates to regulatory pressure and retrofits its existing infrastructure at punishing costs.
We get to be the company that built the model everyone else is eventually mandated to follow. ”
The waiter arrived with the dessert menu. Josie waved it off with one hand without breaking eye contact with Sawyer.
“You’re talking about PR,” she said.
“I’m talking about legacy. Which, in my experience, the market tends to respect more than quarterly projections.”
Josie nodded at that. She picked up his wine glass, turned it once by the stem.
“You understand that getting Gina out of the opposition camp isn’t my job.”
“Gina’s capacity to call a vote is contingent on board support.” Sawyer smirked.
In response, Josie’s mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one. Josie knew exactly how much power she wielded and definitely enjoyed it. The two of them had that in common.
“The federal renewable credits,” Josie said. “You have those figures granular? By site?”
“By site and by state. I can have the full breakdown on your desk before the close of business today.”
“That should do it.” She raised his glass. “Patricia’s easier after a good document. Danielle is easier after Patricia. The others will barely need a light nudge.”
Sawyer raised her own drink. The wine was delicious, and the clink of crystal was quietly, absurdly satisfying. She let herself feel it. The addictive pleasure of a room that had been turned before she’d finished her main course.
“You really think this saves the world?” Josie asked.
She wasn’t mocking her; the question landed with a genuine, slightly baffled sincerity.
Just like Sawyer, she had lived her life inside the financial logic of growth and was only now beginning to suspect there might be a larger equation she’d been solving wrong.
Sawyer thought about a woman chained to an ancient tree, explaining the mycorrhizal network to nineteen thousand strangers.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that it saves my conscience. Everything else is a side benefit.”
Josie smiled properly this time. It reached her eyes. “I’ll have them all on our side by this evening.”
The valet back at home murmured a polite greeting, and Sawyer strode through the main doors feeling, for the first time in three weeks, like she could stand up straight.
She’d done it. She’d done the thing that she had been turning over in her head since the moment she’d watched Nellie walk out of her office, and she had done it in a way that meant it would hold—not a concession dragged out of her by an argument, not a PR gesture designed to appease a headline, but a structural decision made at the right level, sold on the right terms, with the right person.
Alburn Systems was going to redirect its entire expansion strategy toward renewable energy.
Josie Barfield was going to clear the board by tonight. And Gina Marsh was, simply, done.
She felt extraordinarily, unreasonably pleased with herself.
The next order of business felt exponentially more daunting. She wanted to tell Nellie.
She hadn’t quite worked out how. The calls she’d made over three weeks had gone unanswered and she’d accepted that, but leaving a voicemail felt too impersonal, too disconnected. This announcement required Nellie’s face, across some negotiable distance, with the possibility of a real response.
The lobby was cool, hushed, illuminated by the sunlight reflected off the almost blinding marble floor. Sawyer headed toward the elevators, heels clicking in the silence, and pulled her phone out to check what Martha had forwarded from the afternoon’s correspondence.
She almost walked past without looking.
But something made her look up. Some peripheral register, something not quite right in the familiar geometry of the space.
The lobby had its usual presences: the concierge at his desk, the glossy indoor ficus in its sculptural planter, the cream leather sofa beside the elevator bank.
The sofa always sat empty. Nobody used the sofa.
It was not a sofa designed to be sat on so much as a sofa designed to demonstrate that sitting was possible in this building if you were wealthy enough to consider it optional.
Someone was sitting on it.
She was perched on the very edge—barely on it at all—as if she had calculated the exact minimum surface area required and was trying to honor it.
Her boots were flat on the floor, knees together, canvas bag clenched in her lap with both hands, and she was staring at the elevator doors with a faintly compressed expression, lips pressed together, in the grip of a negotiation she was having entirely with herself about whether to keep sitting.
Sawyer stopped in her tracks.
She had been trying for weeks to figure out what she would say when she finally had the opportunity to say something.
She had composed and discarded approximately forty versions of a script.
Some had been too formal, the kind of language she used to terminate vendor contracts.
Some had been the opposite of formal in a way that had alarmed her sufficiently to stop thinking entirely.
None of them had accounted for Nellie Fuller turning up uninvited in the lobby of her building, perched awkwardly on the edge of the decorative sofa as if she was worried about leaving a stain.
Nellie hadn’t noticed her yet. Sawyer took the opportunity to simply drink in the miraculous sight.
Then Nellie’s eyes moved from the elevator doors, made a vague, restless pass over the lobby—she had clearly been periodically diverting her attention to all possible entrances—and landed on her.
The pinched expression didn’t quite resolve. It wasn’t surprise exactly, because she’d clearly been waiting specifically for Sawyer, but it still looked like surprise, as if the reality of her being here had somehow exceeded the theory of it. She went very slightly pink.
Sawyer fought the urge to run toward her and instead settled for a slightly hurried march.
Nellie unclasped her hands from the bag strap and stood.
She took what might have been a preparatory breath.
Then, apparently deciding that whatever she’d been rehearsing on the way over wasn’t going to survive contact with the actual moment, she babbled, “Martha gave me your home address. I don’t— I couldn’t get to the penthouse floor, because the elevator needs a key for it.
So, I was just waiting down here. I was going to ask the concierge to call up, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk. I just, um, waited.”
“How long have you been sitting there?” Sawyer chuckled.
“About forty minutes.” Nellie pouted a little. “The concierge has been very nice about it.”
The concierge was, at this moment, demonstrating a pointed interest in his computer screen.
“I see.” Sawyer found herself lost for words. “Come up.”
She moved to the elevator and pressed her key card against the reader. The doors opened immediately. Nellie followed her in and stood two feet away while the doors slid shut.
As the elevator began to rise, Sawyer looked straight ahead at the brushed steel doors.
She could see Nellie in the reflection of them, slightly blurred, the same way she had been hovering at the edge of Sawyer’s attention since the last time they’d actually stood face to face.
She could feel the warmth of her from two feet away.
Or she believed she could, her skin was on fire.
The floor counter climbed. Four. Seven. Eleven.
Neither of them said anything.
Eighteen. Twenty-three.
Sawyer kept her eyes on the doors and her hands where they were and breathed, slowly, through the torment of being this close to someone she had spent three weeks unable to touch, while the elevator carried them in its quiet patience toward the top of the building.