“Eight years in two-month windows from a van,” Sawyer said, and there was something in it—not quite dry, more like wry, a category Nellie had not previously associated with Sawyer Alburn, which said something about the distance they’d covered since a livestream and a padlock and a thermos of objectively terrible coffee. “This is arguably different.”
“Slightly.”
“Slightly.” Sawyer rolled her eyes.
Nellie laughed and heard how freely it came out and didn’t try to reel it back.
The light was dropping at that low autumn angle she’d come to love without deciding to, long and golden, moving when the wind moved. It did something to the general atmosphere that was not, objectively, helping her maintain a rigorous professional demeanor, and she wished she could lodge a formal complaint with whoever had designed October in a Douglas fir forest.
“Do you ever just walk?” she asked.
Sawyer glanced sideways. “Walk?”
“Without a destination, justust”—she gestured at the slope, the canopy, the light doing its thing—“this.”
Sawyer’s eyebrows drew together. “No.”
“Never?”
“I run in the mornings. On a treadmill.”
Nellie stopped walking.
“It’s efficient,” Sawyer said, clearly sensing the judgment or perhaps pity.
“Facing what?”
“A wall.”
Nellie stared at her for far too long. “A wall?”
“The wall doesn’t present variables early in the morning.”
“Sawyer.” She shook her head slowly. “I once spent three weeks in a parking lot in Oregon eating gas station sushi, and that is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”
“The gas station sushi is objectively more alarming.”
“The sushi was fine! The wall—” She started walking again, grinning at the path ahead. “Is that actually what you prefer, or is it just that you’ve never tried the alternative?”
Sawyer contemplated this for a moment, her gaze growing distant as if she was digging deep into her own psyche. “I used to walk before the company grew past a certain point. Early mornings.”
“Where?”
Another pause, shorter. “Along the route my mother took home.” Said evenly, a fact being submitted to record rather than a memory being opened. “When she worked overnight. If I timed it right, I could meet her bus and walk the last two miles with her.”
Nellie continued pushing through the brush, less concerned now with Sawyer noticing every time she held back a branch or slowed until she had successfully traversed a jagged rock. There was nothing she could say at that moment that wouldn’t be smaller than what had just been offered, and Sawyer, she’d learned, didn’t give things like that with any expectation of return.
They were making the descent through the lower slope when Sawyer’s foot went sideways this time.
Nellie’s arm was at her waist before Sawyer even had time to yelp.
She caught her solidly—feet planted, one arm hooked firm around Sawyer’s back—and Sawyer’s hand came up and gripped Nellie’s forearm by reflex, fingers closing above her wrist, and they stood there: Sawyer not quite recovered, Nellie not quite having let go.
All that time she had spent this morning glancing out the window, silently willing Sawyer to appear, Nellie was starting to believe manifesting might be real.
Sawyer’s hand was on her arm. Sawyer’s face was mere inches from hers. Sawyer’s gaze dropped to her mouth.
Nellie started to panic, hastily pulling them both upright and trying to step away before she let herself drown completely in delusion. But Sawyer pulled her right back.
