Gina.
Sawyer stared at his name for several rings. Then she picked up, because not picking up was a visible choice and she had enough visible choices already attributed to her this week.
“What is it, Gina?”
“Sawyer!” His greeting had the unnerving, somewhat forced glee of an inconvenience framed as good news. “I wanted to loop you in before the end of the day, I’ve had the legal team on this afternoon.”
“About the cover sheet correction?”
“About Fuller.”
Sawyer bit back a groan so forcefully she thought her tongue might bleed.
Gina nattered on, none the wiser. “Given we’re inside a month now, they want to start building the response framework in parallel. Potential board review scenarios, statutory threshold arguments, documentation readiness. The sensible starting point is her current survey findings—where she is, what she’s documented, what she’s likely to prioritize in the remaining weeks.”
“I see…” Sawyer felt a resistance to this conversation like trying to shove two magnets together at the same poles.
“Given that you’ve been out to the site a number of times, the team was hoping you might have something useful to contribute. Anything she may have mentioned directly. The shape of her argument, the zones she’s targeting, any indication of how strong the case actually is at this point.”
Sawyer set her fork down more forcefully than strictly necessary.
“Her species finds,” Gina continued, comfortable and unhurried. “Anything she’s shared with you about the evidence she’s building. It would help the team anticipate where she’s going to land before she gets there.”
What surfaced in Sawyer’s mind, unbidden and immediate, was the gully. Nellie stepping into the mud without hesitation, crouching under the bank overhang, and breathing thatohbefore she’d even registered Sawyer was watching. The salamander and the seep moss.
And then she saw the cottage kitchen at midnight. Two cups of tea and a woodstove. What Sawyer had said about her parents and her childhood—things she had given no one in years, handed across a kitchen table to a woman who had received them without judgment or agenda, and filed them somewhere that looked like care.
“Let the deal run,” Sawyer said flatly and left no negotiating room.
“Sawyer—”
“Twenty-nine days.” She was back to speaking through her teeth. “The survey concludes, Nellie files whatever she’s going to file, and we respond to what’s actually in the submission with the documentation we actually have. That was the agreement.”
“The agreement doesn’t prevent us from being prepared.”
“I know what it prevents.” Sawyer picked up the fork again and stabbed at nothing in particular. “Keep the legal team on standby for the deadline. Let the deal run.”
“Of course,” Gina said, in the smooth and featureless way she said things when she intended to revisit them through a different angle. “Talk soon.”
The salad sat in its box, slightly reorganized by tomato aggression. The draft email sat on her screen. The clock said two fifty-four, and outside the window, the city was still conducting its unremarkable Thursday with complete indifference to everything that had just been said in this room.
And Sawyer sat very still.
What she was feeling—she would name it correctly, because she had been precise about everything else and this did not merit less—was guilt. Not the procedural kind, not the clean administrative guilt of a misrouted document. Something deeper and less manageable: the weight of sitting with information that Nellie could not currently see, while Nellie wasprobably out there in the rain pressing her fingers into a stream bank and being methodically, painstakingly right about all of it.
Gina had just asked Sawyer to hand everything Nellie had found and shared and worked toward, piece by piece, to a team whose entire function was to dismantle it before it could reach a county board. And she had said no, which was true, and which did nothing whatsoever about the fact that Gina had asked. She had asked her as the CEO, the one person who should be prioritizing Nellie’s failure above all else.
She looked at her phone. She looked at the email draft.
She skewered another damned tomato.
13
CHAPTER 13 – NELLIE
The phone rang exactly once before Martha picked up.
Just one clean electronic beat, and then Martha’s crisp voice. “Nellie. One moment.”
