Nellie tilted her head. “Your research team is thorough.”
“That’s what I pay them for.”
“Then they’ll have told you that neither failure was a failure of the ecological case. One was a vote pulled to close the session before we had sufficient leverage. The other—the Redwood Creek survey—lost funding after a state budget cut we had no mechanism to prevent.” She closed the notebook. “The science held up in both instances. The trees are still standing.” Sadnessturned down the corners of Nellie’s full lips this time. “Most of them.”
The qualifier occupied the silence between them for a moment.
“Regardless of how effective youthinkyou are, you’re on my land right now,” Sawyer said finally. “Telling me my surveyors were bought.”
“I said they werepaid. There’s nuance there.” Nellie pulled the pack straps level and stood, brushing detritus from her knee. “You offered me sixty days in front of nearly twenty thousand people because it was the correct tactical move in the moment. I accepted because it was mine. We both know exactly what this is.” Her expression was direct and simple, stripped of performance. “So, I’ll keep finding what your team missed, and you can keep pretending to check on generators, and in fifty-seven days we’ll know which one of us was right about what this land actually contains.”
“I know what this land contains,” Sawyer said. “The appraisal was very clear.”
Nellie laughed.
It was the most disarming thing Sawyer had experienced in years, and she was furious about that.
“Fifty-seven days,” she repeated.
“Fifty-seven days.” Nellie adjusted her headlamp with one distracted push, which did nothing to correct its position. “The offer stands, by the way, if you ever want to actually walk the land. The eastern slope above the drainage is worth seeing. You’re already dressed for it. Mostly.”
Her eyes dropped to Sawyer’s boots—the new ones, bought two days ago, which were functional and waterproof and entirely undeserving of any comment—and that almost-smile returned, quick as a signal light, gone just as fast. Then she turned andpushed through the ferns, the sound of her tuneless hum already moving away through the trees.
Sawyer stood on the access track.
For several minutes all she could focus on was breathing deeply.
Then she walked back to the car.
She was at her desk by two-fifteen. By six o’clock she had cleared the EU matter, drafted two board correspondence items, moved the vendor negotiation to the end of the week, and reviewed a partnership proposal from the infrastructure team that she approved with three minor amendments. A productive afternoon by any documentable measure. The kind of afternoon that justified the morning, rebalanced the ledger, and required no further examination.
At six-thirty, she opened Gina’s construction timeline update—red-flagged in her inbox since Monday, prioritized for review. She read the executive summary. Then she read the first paragraph of the foundation assessment section.
At seven-fifteen, she noticed she had been looking at the same paragraph for nearly forty minutes.
Sawyer sat back slowly.
The paragraph had not changed. Gina’s timeline, the flagged notes on the northern sector, the foundation assessment—all of it was there on the screen exactly as it had been. Her eyes had been on it, and she could report to any interested party that the paragraph’s first sentence concerned concrete pour scheduling. She could not have told you what the second sentence said if her company had depended on it.
What she had been thinking about—without deciding to, without noticing until this moment that she was doing it continuously—was that laugh. The specific, unarchivable quality of it. The way it had no edge and no performance and no relationship whatsoever to what Sawyer Alburn’s presence in aroom usually produced. The fact that it had come from three feet away in a forest clearing and somehow occupied more space than the Douglas firs, and that three hours later it was sitting in the middle of Gina’s construction timeline like it lived there and had no intention of relocating.
Sawyer stared at this fact for a long moment.
Then she looked back at the report.
Then she closed it again.
5
CHAPTER 5 – NELLIE
The lichen was not supposed to be there.
That was Nellie’s first thought, crouching at the base of the survey boulder with her magnifying glass pressed to her eye and her knee soaking through her field pants at a rate that suggested the waterproofing on this particular pair had retired quietly sometime in the previous calendar year.Lobaria pulmonaria.Tree lungwort lichen. Soft, three-dimensional, netted with pale ridges like a topographical map of somewhere very small and very significant, spreading across the north face of the granite outcrop in a colony that had been here, by any reasonable estimate, since before she was born.
It was not supposed to be here because the prior survey—the twenty-two-page document submitted to the county, authored by a team of four credentialed ecologists—had documented zeroLobariain the eastern zone. Zero. The figure had sat in Nellie’s head since she’d pulled the report on day two, filed alongside a small collection of other zeroes that, taken individually, might represent nothing at all and taken together suggested eitherspectacular incompetence or a document assembled with a specific conclusion already in mind.
She photographed it from five angles. Wrote three lines of careful notation. Took a small sample with forceps into a labeled vial. Then she straightened up, pressed one hand to the small of her back, and said, to the forest at large, “Ah, hello, beautiful.”
