“But I assume that you… being you.” Nellie waved her hand vaguely. “You’re quite accustomed to being aggressive.”
Sawyer shifted a little uncomfortably in her seat, suddenly feeling like she was sitting in an interrogation room. “Anaggressive approach was never optional for me.” She heard herself adding, “It never is, when you’re starting from nothing. You have to claw your way up.”
Nellie nodded—not the automatic, meeting-room nod, but something more considered. “Where did you grow up?”
Sawyer had a standard answer for this question, deployed smoothly in approximately forty interviews over twenty years: “Seattle. It was just my parents and me. Nothing noteworthy about my childhood.”
Nellie didn’t push. She simply had more patience than the room required, and Sawyer, who had never in her adult life experienced the company of anyone to whom she felt compelled to keep talking without adequate professional incentive, found that she was talking.
“My mother cleaned offices. Three buildings downtown. She worked the overnight shift so she could be home before school started. My father—” She pushed lentils around her bowl. “He was present intermittently. For the first twelve years, anyway. After that, he wasn’t present at all, which turned out to be marginally preferable.”
“Twelve’s a hard age for intermittent,” Nellie said softly.
“Every age is a hard age for intermittent,” Sawyer muttered. “I learned that faster than I would have preferred.”
Nellie nodded. Then she said a little more brightly, “The Oregon campaign—the one I worked on in 2019 that actually worked—we had forty-one days and no legal team and a county board that had already made up its mind.” The instant change of subject caught Sawyer slightly off guard, but she appreciated it nonetheless. “I borrowed a car to get to the survey sites because mine had failed its emissions test and I couldn’t afford the repair. We ate gas station sandwiches for three weeks.”
“And you won.”
“We won.” Nellie smiled at the table, not at Sawyer. “Took three more months of legal filings after the initial decision, and we had a volunteer attorney who billed exactly zero hours and was worth every penny of it. But yes. We won.”
“And Montana?” Sawyer asked. She’d read the file. She said it anyway.
Nellie’s eyebrows pulled together. “Montana was—” She exhaled. “The science was solid. Better than Oregon, honestly. The budget cut was real and the timing was brutal, and—” She paused. Turned her mug in a slow half-circle. “My ex-girlfriend was running the funding coalition. When the budget collapsed, it took the professional relationship with it. And the other kind.” Another rotation of the mug. “Which didn’t help my focus in the final stretch.”
The word arrived with no fanfare attached to it:ex-girlfriend. Nellie was not looking at Sawyer. Her gaze had moved to the window.
“The trees,” she said. “In Montana. Are they—? You mentioned they weremostlystill standing.”
Nellie smiled warmly. “They are. The campaign held long enough for a private conservation trust to step in with an acquisition offer.” She finally returned to making eye contact, that golden glint showing true pride. “Which I had nothing to do with, and yet I choose to count as a win on the grounds that if the campaign hadn’t elevated the profile—” She stopped. “You don’t need me to finish that sentence.”
“You were going to claim credit by extended causal chain.”
“I was going to claim credit by extended causal chain,” she confirmed, and grinned fully this time. Sawyer had to look away before she stared too long.
They finished the soup. Nellie made tea and offered Sawyer a cup. It was something that was neither chamomile nor the aggressively functional black she’d have expected,but something with ginger and lemon that turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. Sawyer told her about the Singapore deal, the one in 2021 that had nearly come apart at the third-party audit stage. Not because it was relevant to anything, but because Nellie had asked a question—what’s the acquisition you’re most proud of?—and the Singapore deal was not the answer Sawyer had given to the four journalists who’d asked a version of the same question, but it was the accurate one.
Nellie told her about a survey she’d done in her second year of fieldwork, before the activism had become her prime focus: a three-week solo count in the Cascades for a university project that had been one of the worst experiences of her professional life and also, in some way she couldn’t fully articulate, the reason she was still doing it.
The woodstove crackled softly, and the clock above the hearth ticked loud enough that Sawyer wondered how on earth Nellie got any sleep.
“It’s past midnight,” she gasped.
Nellie looked behind her to confirm. “Huh, so it is.”
Sawyer pushed back from the table and the chair scraped loudly on the flagstone. The sound was unreasonably final. “I should— The drive is forty-five minutes.”
“Right.” Nellie stood too. “Thank you for the fuel,” she said. “And for having dinner with me, I guess. I’m sure it wasn’t in your schedule.”
“The soup was excellent.” Sawyer hedged, with her coat already buttoned, another that was perhaps a degree too crisp for the occasion.
“I’ll tell the lentils.”
Sawyer allowed a stilted chuckle to pass her lips as she stepped off the porch.
The car was cold. She sat in it with the engine running, the heat already climbing toward bearable, and tried to put the last three and a half hours in order.
She had arrived with ten gallons of diesel. She had delivered the diesel. These were the only two items on the evening’s agenda, and they had been completed within the first five minutes. What had followed—the soup, the table, the tea, the conversation about Montana and Singapore and her mother’s overnight cleaning shifts, which she had not mentioned to anyone in years and had mentioned tonight to a woman she had known for less than a month—bore no resemblance to anything she could categorize as strategic or professional or even broadly rational.
