Sawyer had turned. She read the surface of Nellie’s face like it displayed all of the answers she was looking for, and then her lips pressed into a thin line. Lips that had earnestly captured Nellie’s not minutes before.
“I should head back,” Nellie said curtly.
Sawyer held her gaze for a moment. She didn’t ask about the call. “I’ll see myself out,” she said.
Nellie nodded and started up the slope without looking back.
She heard the car door close. The engine. The tires on the gravel, moving back up the access track through the trees at that slow, careful pace, until the sound thinned and the forest swallowed it and there was nothing left but the stream andthe last light and the filings arriving one by one in her inbox, Paloma’s message at the top of the chain:Docs attached. Call me.
Nellie stood at the porch railing and looked at the place where the track disappeared into the tree line.
She would call Sawyer tomorrow. Ask the question directly, cleanly, without a verdict already built into it; that was how she worked. Evidence first. She would hear what the answer actually was rather than the answer she’d already half-decided, and she would assess it with the same rigor she applied to everything else. That was the correct approach. That was what a scientist did.
She did not tell Paloma about the kiss.
She told herself this was because there was nothing definitive to report yet. She told herself the two things—the kiss and the planning application—were distinct data points that deserved separate analysis, and collapsing them into one panicked phone call while Sawyer’s taillights were still cooling was not a rational approach to either.
Mostly, she didn’t tell Paloma because she wasn’t ready to say it out loud before she’d had time to hold it somewhere private for a while. Brief, certain, real—and she was not ready to offer that up to Paloma’s concerns, which were, she knew, very reasonable.
12
CHAPTER 12 – SAWYER
The city was doing nothing interesting. Sawyer had been staring at it for twenty minutes and had confirmed this empirically.
Twenty-two floors below, Thursday morning was proceeding with its usual indifference: cabs, commuters, a delivery truck double-parked outside the building across the street with a complete absence of self-consciousness. The sky was the flat, non-committal gray of a day that had decided not to commit to weather. She had looked at this view from this window on approximately eight hundred consecutive workdays and had never previously found it necessary to catalogue its contents in this level of detail.
The problem was not the view.
The problem was that every time she stopped cataloguing the view, her mind went directly back to a muddy slope and specifically to the eleven seconds that had occurred on that slope before Paloma Whoever had rung with the timing of a controlled demolition. The mouth. The hand on her jaw, Nellie’spalm warm against the line of her face, not hesitating, like it had known where it was going. The way Sawyer had pulled her back in rather than stepping away, which had not been a decision so much as an instinctive discovery about what she was going to do. Nellie’s bewildered stillness in the first seconds before she kissed back, like a calculation running very fast to a conclusion she’d already suspected.
Sawyer leant her forehead against the window.
She was forty-six years old. She had, across the course of her adult life, been kissed by various women in various circumstances, and she had not, following any of those occasions, spent the subsequent eighteen hours in a state of low-grade cognitive disruption that expressed itself as an inability to read financial documents. She had a board call this afternoon. She had a supplier renegotiation at two. She had a company valued at eight-point-four billion dollars that operated on the understanding that its CEO was a person capable of processing a depreciation schedule.
She turned from the window. Sat back down. Opened the acquisition model for the third time and read the executive summary once more from the top, moving her eyes across each line with focused intention as if she had not, eleven hours ago, kissed a field ecologist on a muddy slope and then drove forty-five minutes home thinking about it continuously.
By line four, she was back on the slope.
She closed the acquisition model.
Martha appeared in the doorway with a stack of documents and the expression she wore when she had something to say and was electing, for the time being, not to say it. She set the stack on the left side of the desk, squaring the corners with two precise taps.
“Documents requiring review,” she said. “The supplier amendment is flagged on top. The northern acreage file isunderneath.” She pinned Sawyer with a pointed look. “I’d suggest reading through thefullpacket rather than the summary page alone, given some of the material further in.”
Sawyer looked at the stack. Then at Martha. “Further in?”
“Page four onward.” Martha’s face communicated nothing further, which was a form of communication Sawyer had learned to treat as a complete sentence. “Your nine-thirty called to confirm. I’ve moved it to ten.”
“Why?”
Martha shrugged and somehow managed to look the furthest thing from nonchalant Sawyer had ever seen. “I thought you might want some time this morning.”
She left before Sawyer could determine exactly what that meant.
Sawyer pulled the stack toward her. She read the supplier amendment—two pages, three clauses she found mildly objectionable, all of which she annotated in the margin with the abbreviated shorthand her legal team had learned to interpret over fifteen years. She set it aside.
She turned to page four.
