The fog had thinned a little by seven. Not enough to call it morning, exactly, but enough to make out the access road cutting through the tree line forty feet to her left and the patrol car parked at the border. Deputy Haines had been sitting in it for two hours and had not gotten out, which Nellie took as a hopeful sign. She’d been zip-tied, cited, removed from trees, and briefly detained in four states. She knew exactly how law enforcement looked when they were about to do something about a situation, and Deputy Haines looked like a woman who had decided, somewhere around hour one, that this was above her pay grade and someone else could figure it out. She’d also given Nellie athumbs up when she’d waved at her, which she felt spoke well of her as a person.
Paloma: Alburn sent anyone yet?
Nellie: just county deputy. Haines. She’s fine.
Paloma: fine? you’re chained to a tree in the middle of nowhere and the deputy is FINE?
Nellie: she has a very reassuring thumbs-up
Paloma: …
Paloma: I’m driving up
Nellie: you don’t have to do that
Paloma: I know I don’t have to. I want to. Also I don’t trust any of this. Also you are definitely not eating.
Nellie: I took another sip of the coffee
Paloma: you’re the worst.
Nellie heard the construction crew before she saw them—the low diesel grumble of a truck engine rolling up through the quiet and then two vehicles coming down the access road. A company pickup and a flatbed. They pulled up at the tree line and idled there for a moment before anyone got out, like they were discussing it or possibly taking a moment to reflect on their life choices.
The foreman was a heavyset man in an orange vest. Dave, according to his vest. Dave had the face of someone who had been in construction for twenty years and had cultivated, as a matter of professional survival, an essentially bottomless capacity for low-grade exasperation. He walked up to Eleanor, stopped about ten feet out, and performed a slow visual inventory of the scene: the chain, the padlock, the sign, the duct-taped phone, the thermos of terrible coffee, and Nellie herself, who smiled at him with complete goodwill.
“Morning,” he said, in the tone of a man for whom the morning was not particularly good.
“Good morning! I made coffee if you want some. Although I have to warn you it’s genuinely awful. Like, I would not recommend it. I drank it because it’s all I have, but I want you to go into it with realistic expectations.”
Dave looked at the coffee. He looked at the chain again. Then he looked at the sign, squinting hard at the bottom two words. “You ran out of room,” he said.
“A little.”
“On the sign that’s your whole argument.”
“I feel like the spirit comes through.”
Heaving a deep sigh, Dave rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. Behind him, two crew members had climbed down from the pickup with their arms folded, though it had become somewhat less defensive at the coffee offer. The younger one was fighting a losing battle with a smile. The other had his phone out and was clearly filming, which Nellie chose to interpret as allyship.
“We’ve got a work order,” Dave grunted.
“I know you do.” Nellie meant what came next, and she made sure it sounded that way. “I’m not here to give you trouble. I’m here to make sure the county board understands what they’re voting on before it’s too late. That’s it. You’re not my problem, Dave, and I’d like to not be yours.” She’d worked enough of these to know that the crew was never the enemy; they were people with mortgages and kids in school who’d shown up to do a job someone else had created. Directing anger at Dave helped nobody and made her look unhinged on a stream that was now, according to the counter, approaching fifteen thousand viewers.
Dave absorbed this with slightly raised eyebrows. “How many times you done this kind of thing?”
“Chain actions? Eight or nine.”
Something flickered across his face—not quite respect, but close. He tipped his head back to follow Eleanor’s trunk upinto the fog. For a moment, the exasperation left him entirely, replaced by the involuntary recalibration that happened when a person genuinely registered the scale of something four centuries old. He stood there long enough that the younger crew member stopped pretending to look at his phone.
Then Dave sighed again. “I’m going to have to call the site manager.”
“Of course. Do you want any coffee while you wait? The offer stands. Terrible coffee is still technically coffee.”
The younger guy abandoned the sleeve maneuver entirely and just laughed. Dave shot him a look that had no real heat in it, and pulled out his phone, half-turning away—the posture, Nellie noted, of someone who had just clocked the camera and decided he wanted as little of his face in this as possible.
She turned back to the stream. “That’s Dave,” she told the chat. “Dave, dear, wave for the eleven—sorry, fifteen—thousand people watching.”
Dave did not wave. He did hunch his shoulders incrementally, which Nellie felt deserved some acknowledgment.
