Nellie went inside.
She pressed her back against the door, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply.
8
CHAPTER 8 – SAWYER
Atree-hugging nuisance had no business popping up in a budget review.
And yet there she was: Nellie Fuller’s face, surfacing unbidden in the middle of Q4 variance analysis with the reliability of a tide Sawyer had been pretending not to track. Nine days. That was how long she had been filing the same thoughts underirrelevantand watching them climb back out of the drawer.
She was not good at lying to herself. She was beginning to suspect she had never been good at lying to herself, and had simply never before given herself enough material to work with.
The spreadsheet on her second monitor contained seventeen data points across six infrastructure categories, none of which were succeeding in holding her attention. She moved her eyes back and forth across the figures, and not ten seconds later caught herself reconstructing—with forensic accuracy—the exact sequence of Nellie’s movements in that gully. The way she’d stepped into the mud without hesitation. The shift in herexpression when she’d spotted the salamander. That particularoh—barely a word, barely a sound—which had traveled three feet through cold forest air and done something to Sawyer’s cardiovascular system that ought not to have been possible.
Sawyer pinched the bridge of her nose, groaned loudly, and ultimately accepted that Q4 infrastructure variance was not, at this precise moment, the review she was conducting.
What she was actually conducting was yet another inventory of her own behavior. Item by item.
Ten gallons of diesel.
Three canceled meetings.
A cup of tea at a kitchen table at midnight.
An honest confession about her childhood, which she had not mentioned, in those terms, to anyone in approximately fifteen years.
These were not the actions of a CEO protecting a company asset. She could not construct a version of events in which they were. She had tried. She had tried for nine days with the full force of a mind that had graduated top of its Wharton class, and the argument would not hold.
The intercom on her desk lit up.
“Gina is ready when you are,” Martha said. “The board call is at three.”
“Send her in at two.”
“She’s here now.”
Sawyer looked at the time. “Tell her to—” She stopped. This was a waste she couldn’t afford. “Fine. Two minutes.”
She closed the Q4 spreadsheet and opened Gina’s timeline update, which she had last reviewed properly on the night she had spent forty minutes reading the same paragraph while thinking about Nellie’s laugh.
She spent two minutes actually reading it.
Gina arrived shortly after already radiating confidence. Her plan had not yet received critical input and was therefore, in her estimation, thriving. She set her presentation tablet on the corner of Sawyer’s desk and stood beside it, hands loosely clasped.
“Phase two,” she opened, advancing to the first slide. “The northern sector foundation work. Original schedule had us breaking ground on day sixty-two. I’ve revised the target to day fifty-eight based on current conditions.”
Sawyer looked at the slide. “The survey’s only in week three.”
“It is.” Her face arranged itself into something between patience and good cheer. “We’ve done a full legal review of the access agreement. Fuller’s findings so far don’t meet the co-occurrence threshold for priority habitat designation. Even if she hits the threshold, the county board review takes thirty to sixty days minimum, by which point our initial work in the northern sector will be structurally complete.”
“You’re scheduling around a potential board review, not accounting for it.”
“I’m building a timeline that advances the company’s interests while leaving adequate legal response room.” She clicked to the next slide: a projected cost model, phase two and three overlaid. “The investor briefing is Thursday. Barfield is already making noise about the delay; the Phoenix Ridge project is a line item in the Q3 deck, and they want to see movement.”
Sawyer studied the numbers. They were good numbers. They said all the things numbers were supposed to say when a project was proceeding on schedule, and they were built, at their foundation, on an assumption so baked in it had stopped appearing as a variable at all.
“This is predicated on Fuller not making her case,” Sawyer said frankly.
