Nellie chewed on that statement, and somehow it made her jaw ache more than her burnt breakfast.
“I don’t know if she’s as evil as your conspiracy theories make her out to be, Pal.”
“Conspiracy? She’s abillionaire,Nellie! Of course we should be wary! Who even are you right now?”
“Ugh, I know!” Nellie screwed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know what to tell you. I just don’tget the feeling she’s trying to screw me over. I feel like I can get through to her!”
The unmistakable sound of tires on gravel scratched at her ears.
Nellie’s whole body went still.
“I have to call you back,” she mumbled.
“Nellie, wait?—”
She ended the call.
She also noticed, two seconds before the car came into view through the kitchen window, that she was covered in black toast crumbs. She brushed down her fleece with both hands. Then she raked her fingers through her hair and immediately registered she’d probably made whatever was happening there considerably worse.
Sawyer Alburn stepped out of her car like a European supermodel—expression arranged, posture graceful, the car door swinging closed behind her like a million-dollar commercial. Dark coat, not the cashmere. The boots, visibly broken in now. Her hair pulled back cleanly. She looked like she’d made a considered peace with this terrain without surrendering an inch of herself to it, which was, Nellie thought—in a completely objective, professionally detached capacity—intensely irritating and also not quite the right word for the feeling.
She went to the door.
“Ms. Alburn.” She was being professional.
“Ms. Fuller.” Sawyer stopped at the foot of the porch steps and her gaze dropped briefly to Nellie’s collar.
“Toast.” Nellie coughed, locating the crumbs by feel. “Yes.”
“I’m here to walk the survey boundary with the site manager,” Sawyer said. “Confirm the reset is consistent with the original acquisition plot.”
Nellie looked past her at the empty car. “Where’s the site manager?”
“Unavoidably detained.”
“Right…”
Sawyer held her gaze and did not elaborate on the nature of the detention, or on why she’d come anyway, or on the strange energy currently occupying the space between them.
“Well.” Nellie reached back for her jacket from the hook behind the door. “I suppose you’ll need a guide, then.”
The lower slope was Nellie’s easiest circuit—two hours out, less on the return, through mixed conifer she’d been walking long enough to navigate without demanding her full attention. Which was useful, because the survey required almost none of it and her full attention was currently otherwise engaged.
She did not think about this. She pointed out a nurse log, a bracket fungus colony, and the specific arc of slope where the drainage would be running heavily next month. Sawyer walked at her left shoulder and asked questions that were, without exception, more perceptive than anything Nellie would have predicted three weeks ago.
“The restriction cost you several days of meaningful access,” Sawyer said, at the first switchback. “Yes, well, twenty-nine days remaining, technically.” Nellie stepped over a large root and stared intently at the ground until she had confirmed that Sawyer had safely done the same. “I’ll manage.”
“You sound certain.”
“I am certain.” She glanced sideways. “You sound skeptical.”
“Pragmatic.” Sawyer ducked under a low alder branch without breaking stride. “Not the same thing.”
“In this case, it is.”
“The statutory threshold requires co-occurrence documentation across?—”
“I know what it requires.” Nellie pushed through a stand of young firs and tried to position her body in a way that didn’t plainly state that she was holding them back for Sawyer to pass. “I’ve been doing this for eight years.”
