“She is quite beguiling, I’ll give her that,” she muttered.
Martha chuckled quietly. “You built your company because you wanted something nobody could take from you. Nellie Fuller chained herself to a tree for the same reason. She’s just less interested in doing it quietly. I have watched you meet formidable people for a decade, Sawyer. She’s the first one who has ever made you cancel your meetings and move your furniture.”
“I moved the furniture to install a wall bracket.”
“You moved your treadmill because you couldn’t stare at the blank wall without thinking of her.” Martha’s tone was entirely even, which made it worse. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.”
Sawyer picked at her burrito and blew out a long, suffering sigh.
“I think I’m falling in love with her,” she whispered. She had not said it before. She hadn’t intended to say it now. Breathing it out as quietly as possible felt as close as she could get to avoiding the confession. “Which is?—”
“Complicated,” Martha offered.
“Catastrophic. I was going to say catastrophic.”
“Is it?”
Sawyer dropped her head into her hands, entirely disregarding whether or not she might be getting salsa in her hair. “I don’t know what to do with it,” she moaned. “I don’t know how to protect the company and not destroy her at the same time, and I don’t know how to choose between them, and I’ve never in my adult life found myself in a situation where I couldn’t maneuver all the pieces to fit perfectly together.”
“Maybe,” Martha said carefully, “you’ve been a slave to the company for so many years that you’ve forgotten thatyou’rethe boss. You can make any piece fit however you want it to, even if that means changing its shape or throwing one off the board entirely.”
Sawyer looked at her.
“That,” she said after a moment, “is surprisingly useful.”
“I have my moments.”
“I’m still paying you the same amount regardless.”
“I know,” Martha said. “It’s fine. I was planning on expensing the Mexican food anyway.”
“Understood.” Sawyer chuckled. “Well, seeing as you’re still being paid even when I take the day off, you might as well help me with this flatscreen.”
The rain had grown heavier while they worked, hammering at the windows until the city was completely obscured behind a blurred sheet. Thunder, low and rolling, announced itself from a distance and then arrived with ten times the force. The windows lit white, once. Then again.
Sawyer was about to comment on the pathetic fallacy of it all when everything went dark. The lights cut. The city below swallowed itself whole, every building extinguished simultaneously in a way she’d never seen and hadn’t thought was possible, a blackout that ate the skyline she had looked at from this window eight hundred times until it was simply gone, replaced by a darkness that went all the way to the horizon.
Lightning illuminated it once, stark white, like a photograph of the city without itself.
Sawyer was on her feet. She was back at the window in an instant, staring at the dark, and one thought arrived with such clarity that it crowded out everything else in her head—all the careful reasoning, all the unresolved calculations, all of Martha’s correct observations—and it was not complicated and not conflicted and not in need of a spreadsheet.
It was Nellie, in a cottage alone, in the middle of a forest in a blackout, in a storm that was now shaking the glass, and Sawyer had driven the access road often enough to know exactly where it was in the dark.
She grabbed her keys.
15
CHAPTER 15 – NELLIE
The laptop screen went dark mid-keystroke and the lamp took itself out a half-second later with a flat, conclusive click, but the generator picked up the slack almost immediately, humming to life from somewhere beyond the kitchen wall while the lights blinked back on with a slightly self-satisfied glow.
Nellie watched all of this happen from her chair, so accustomed to these blips in electrical power that she simply took the moment to roll her shoulders and crack her neck before getting back to work.
When her ancient laptop came back to life, the survey data entry program had closed. She opened it again, navigated to the right file, and found it intact—every entry from the last two hours preserved in clean, legible columns, because she’d been auto-syncing to her backup every ten minutes. Nellie had started religiously backing up her files after a thunderstorm in the Cascades in 2016 wiped four days of invertebrate sampling data. She’d cried for almost an entire afternoon before she’d finallypulled herself together enough to reconfigure her entire backup protocol.
She glanced at the storm raging beyond the windows and saved her file again manually anyway, twice, out of principle. But soon enough her gaze was wandering back to the window.
The forest loomed enormous, not frightening exactly, but rearranged, all its usual textures blurred and its usual sounds pulled up by the roots and thrown elsewhere. Lightning lit the canopy in a flat, eerie white, there and gone before Nellie’s brain finished registering it. Then came the thunder, close enough that it sat in her chest cavity briefly before moving on.
