There was no reason for it she could name.
She turned and looked back.
Nellie hadn’t moved from the railing. She didn’t move now. She looked back, and neither of them said anything, and the thing that moved through the dark between them—across the short distance of cold porch air and two feet of pine board—had no professional category and nothing whatsoever to do with the deal.
11
CHAPTER 11 – NELLIE
The toast had been burning for approximately forty seconds before Nellie registered it as her problem.
She was standing at the kitchen window with her coffee mug held halfway to her mouth, conducting what she had privately classified—in the interest of maintaining some dignity—as aperimeter check. Not watching for a car. Not oscillating between the access track and the clock in a way that would, if filmed, resemble the behavior of a very anxious meerkat. A perimeter check. Methodical. Spatial awareness. Nellie Fuller was a field ecologist with forty-three documented species across three riparian zones and an increasingly urgent hypothesis about the northern sector’s hydrology, and she was?—
The smoke alarm weighed in.
“Okay!” She yanked the toaster lever and surveyed the damage. Both sides had committed fully to the cause. She scraped the top slice over the sink with the pragmatic resolve of someone cutting losses on a failed experiment, then held the second slice up to the window light and made the call that it was,technically, still bread. She applied butter on the grounds that butter resolved most problems and ate it standing at the counter with her back to the window, which lasted eleven seconds before her neck made a unilateral decision.
The access track was still empty.
She checked the time. Seven forty-two. She had checked the access track fourteen times this morning, which was approximately thirteen more than any professional operation—or healthy mental state—required. She was going to stop. Starting now. Absolutely no more perimeter checks.
She checked the access track again.
The pinging sound from her laptop had Nellie jumping out of her skin, first in shock and then in her haste to reach the table.
An email had arrived from Alburn Systems Legal Office. Subject:Phoenix Ridge Acreage—Survey Access Confirmation.Two paragraphs of formal language navigating two sub-clauses and one reference to the original access agreement before arriving, in its final sentence, at the thing it was actually saying.
“The northern boundary markers had been reset to their original positions as documented in the initial acquisition survey, effective immediately.”
Signed: Sawyer Alburn.
Not Gina’s office. Not a site representative. Not some operations directive passed down through an unnamed chain. Sawyer. In full, at the bottom, the same clean signature Nellie had seen on the original access agreement.
Her teeth arduously ground down on the burnt toast as she read the email three more times. Then she almost jumped out of her skin again as her phone vibrated loudly on the table.
“Sheesh!” she yelped,. “I thought I lived a somewhat calm life.”
Of course, there was no reason for her to be surprised; her best friend called every morning so that they could share lifeupdates over breakfast. Clearly Nellie was a little on edge these days.
“The boundary’s been reset,” she said the moment the line connected.
Paloma’s reply came somewhat garbled around the buzz of an electric toothbrush, signaling that she was running late this morning. “All markers?”
“Yep. The email came directly from Alburn’s legal office. Sawyer signed it herself.”
“And she wants what, exactly?”
“I don’t think she wants anything.” Nellie pushed her coffee mug aside and put the phone on speaker so she could return to her toast. “I think she found out what Gina did and corrected it.”
She heard Paloma spit into the sink more forcefully than was strictly necessary. “You think she corrected it out of the goodness of her heart?”
“I think she corrected it because it was wrong and she?—”
“Nellie, what’s the catch?”
“I’m not sure there is one.”
“Pfft.There’s always a catch. That’s what being rich means. You manufacture the catch yourself and then release it at a time of your choosing.” Paloma sighed deeply. “She’s not your friend, Nellie. She’s the person on the other side of a legal agreement with an eighty-million-dollar reason to see you fail.”
