CHAPTER 25 – NELLIE
The penthouse was exactly what Nellie had expected, which was to say it was nothing like any apartment she’d ever been in before.
Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, the city spread out in every direction, like someone had tipped a jar of lights and let it settle across the valley floor. Nellie winced at the dizzying height and turned her attention elsewhere.
The living space alone was probably the square footage of twenty Doloreses, and everything in it—the pale marble, the low furniture, the enormous abstract canvas taking up most of one wall—had been chosen with the kind of consideration that cost more than money.
It cost taste, time, and an absolute commitment to never having anything in your home that wasn’t exactly right.
It was extraordinary. Nellie was going to be sick.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Sawyer asked, setting her keys on the kitchen island.
“No. Thank you.” Nellie put her bag down near the entry and did a slow, slightly manic survey of the room that she hoped looked like appreciation and probably looked like panic.
The elevator ride alone had nearly finished her off, and her nervous system had immediately started running a full catastrophe drill.
She wrung her hands together before blurting, “Martha told me about the vote of no confidence.”
Sawyer, who was filling a glass with water for herself, went very still. Then she turned around. She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms—not defensively, more like she was settling into a conversation she intended to take seriously.
“Did she now,” she said. Statement, not question.
“She called me on Monday. She said the board is— She used the word ‘uproar.’” Nellie winced. “Is that true?”
“A portion of the board is agitated.” Sawyer’s mouth curved slightly at the corner. “Gina in particular has been expressing herself with some enthusiasm. She’llfind that enthusiasm curtailed shortly.”
“Sawyer,” Nellie groaned. “You could lose your company!”
“I could. But I very much doubt it.”
“That’s—” She pressed her hand flat against her churning stomach.
“I am so incredibly grateful. For what you’re doing.
For what you’ve decided. I genuinely can’t—” Nellie shook her head, because language was failing her in a way it rarely did.
The thing was, she had prepared for a lot of scenarios on the drive over here.
She’d prepared for anger, for coolness, for the controlled and clipped register Sawyer retreated into when she didn’t want to be read.
She had not prepared for being this overwhelmed by the simple reality of standing in Sawyer’s home having this conversation.
“I don’t want you to lose your position over this.
I need you to understand that. I can’t be the reason—”
“You won’t be.”
“I potentially very much could be.”
“Nellie.” Sawyer set the water glass down and pushed off from the counter.
She crossed the kitchen into the living space and stopped close enough that Nellie had to tilt her chin slightly to hold eye contact.
“I know how to run my own company. I have the board on side already. Gina’s vote of no confidence isn’t going to the floor.
I am not losing anything.” She paused. “At least not where my job is concerned.”
Nellie released a breath that felt like it had been pushing against her rib cage since she’d picked up Martha’s call three days ago. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ve got this.”
The assurance startled a short, broken laugh out of her. The laugh seemed to do something to both of them because Sawyer’s shoulders dropped half an inch, and Nellie felt every muscle in her body relax more than they had since she’d stormed out of that office.
“There’s something else I have to say.” Sawyer’s eyes bored into Nellie with an intensity that had nothing to hide behind, and Nellie, who had spent a significant portion of her adult life being looked at like she was charming or eccentric or mildly inconvenient, was briefly incapable of moving. “I owe you an apology.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do. I handled the decision to relocate the development badly. Not the decision itself, the how of it. The way I assumed that moving the site somewhere else was a reasonable solution without once stopping to consider how it would land for you.” She looked away briefly, at the windows, and clenched her jaw.
“I have spent a very long time building things for profit and never seriously asking what they cost. I did not once sit down and think about what I actually had the power to do with the resources I’ve accumulated, beyond accumulating more of them.
That was narrow. Genuinely narrow-minded in a way I am not going to flatter myself by calling an oversight. ”
Nellie’s throat tightened. She had come here under the assumption that Sawyer was overhauling her entire company just to patch up whatever tentative relationship had been forming between them.
Paloma pointed out that wanting to get back into a woman’s bed wasn’t exactly the best reason to try and save the planet, but Nellie insisted a win was a win.
Neither of them had considered for a moment that Sawyer Alburn had had some sort of soul-searching epiphany.
“And I am,” Sawyer continued, “I’m sorry.
For not thinking about your feelings when I made that call.
And for not recognizing that I had the capacity to make a real difference in the world rather than just building more infrastructure.
” She reached up and rubbed the back of her neck, a nervous gesture Nellie had never seen from the CEO before.
“I should have seen that sooner. You were right to be furious with me.”
For a moment Nellie couldn’t trust herself to speak.
“I never thought I’d win this big,” she finally managed, when she was sure her voice would cooperate.
“How could you not? You’re Nellie Fuller.” The raw emotion shining in Sawyer’s pale eyes made Nellie want to sob.
“When I set up camp in that forest, I had this whole strategy. Paloma and I had talked about it for months: the approach, the media angles, the legal pressure points. I was absolutely ready to be dragged off by security. I was so ready to lose.” She shook her head at herself.
“It didn’t occur to me that I was going to win.
And definitely not like this.” She looked up at Sawyer and felt, absurdly, the sting of tears at the back of her eyes that she was going to absolutely refuse to actually cry.
“Do you understand what this means? Not just for Phoenix Ridge. For what comes next, and the company Alburn Systems becomes, the statement it makes to every other company watching—” Her voice snagged.
She cleared her throat firmly. “I think this might be the biggest achievement I ever manage. In my entire career.”
“You deserve it.” Sawyer smiled, her hands raising awkwardly and then dropping back to her sides. Nellie wished more than anything that she would just touch her. “I want to be honest with you about something.”
“Another apology? I’m not sure I can—”
“Not an apology. A confession, I suppose. Just so we’re clear. I’m sure you’ve realized I’m not entirely doing this for the planet.”
Desperately trying to banish Paloma’s voice from her mind, Nellie pressed her lips together against a smirk.
“I mean, I am doing it for the planet,” Sawyer amended. “I’m just not going to pretend that the planet is all I was thinking about when I sat in my apartment for five days in my pajamas running the numbers.”
The tears were back. Nellie blinked at them, hard.
“You wore pajamas for five days?”
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“Sawyer, that is very much a thing—”
“Okay, okay, it was something. But I don’t want you to get too drunk on the power.
I wouldn’t want you to make a habit of convincing CEOs to fall in love with you so that you can redirect their entire company strategy toward fighting climate change.
” Sawyer raked a hand through her hair as she huffed a nervous laugh. “It would be very unfair to them.”
Nellie heard her own heartbeat galloping in her ears.
“Fall in love?” she echoed.
“Yes.” Sawyer held her gaze without flinching. “With you. That’s what’s happened. Just so we’re clear… you know, on all the data points.”
The data points were crystal clear. Nellie didn’t need any maps or notebooks or even a damn satellite to see exactly what she’d caught a glimpse of when that monumental word had slipped from her lips out by the mountains. What she’d been fixated on ever since.
“I fell in love with you too,” she said. “For the record.”
Finally demolishing that agonizing distance between them, Sawyer reached for Nellie’s face with both hands and captured her lips like a grand prize.
Nellie’s hands found the front of Sawyer’s jacket, and she grabbed it, fistfuls of expensive fabric, and kissed her back with the accumulated hunger of too many days of altitude and soup and birdwatching and the very glaring knowledge of exactly what she’d been missing.
When it became a vital necessity to breathe again, Nellie wound her arms around Sawyer’s waist and held her close.
She was nowhere near ready to stand any distance between them.
It was then that she made the mistake of opening her eyes again and was reminded of how close she stood to those monstrous windows.
“Yeesh! How,” Nellie whined, turning her face into Sawyer’s neck, “do you live like this?”
She felt more than heard the low sound of Sawyer’s laugh. “Like what?”
“This.” Nellie gestured vaguely at the glass without lifting her head to look at it. “You exist up here, all the way up in the sky, all the time. I don’t understand how you haven’t developed a perfectly rational fear of heights.”