Sawyer didn’t answer, which was its own answer.
“Then last week… Last week Gina authorized the boundary expansion and moved the markers without telling you, and then you showed up here at ten at night to tell me you didn’t know anything about it. And you reset the boundary, and I believed you. I still believe you. But?—”
“Nellie—”
“I’m not finished.” Nellie blew out a frustrated sigh. She was, she discovered, actually angry, which was less complicated than the other things she’d been feeling all day and considerably easier to speak from. “On the ridge, you said you were lost. You said you felt out of your depth every time you saw me. You let me kiss you, youpulled me in.” She threw her hands in the air as if she were begging the heavens for any of it to make sense. “Andthenyou pushed me away again and just walked away.”
Sawyer crossed her arms. Whether it was a defensive move was yet to be determined. But she let Nellie speak.
“And tonight, you show up here, in a damn blackout, to check whether I’m alright. Even though you could have called or emailed, and you knew I had a backup generator if the firstone failed and I am quite obviously”—Nellie gestured at her own clearly-intact self—”alright.” She sat up straighter on the couch cushions. “So I’m asking you, are you here because you actually care, or have you just been running surveillance on me with better manners than Gina would be able to?”
The silence that followed was long enough that Nellie started cataloguing the sounds behind it: rain on the roof, the hum of the generator, the creak and settle of the cottage framing under the wind. Sawyer stood in the middle of the room with her arms folded and her jaw working and looked at nothing in particular. Then, finally, she looked at Nellie.
“I’m confusing myself,” she said. Not defensive. Flat, factual, like she’d examined the situation from every angle, and this was what it had yielded. “I can’t give you a clean argument because I don’t have one. Everything I’ve done in the last few weeks has pointed in two different directions at once, and I’m aware of how that reads.”
“Right,” Nellie agreed.
“The boundary—thatwasGina, and I handled it. The planning application…” Sawyer pressed two fingers to her temple briefly. “That was a decision I knew was coming, and I let it proceed before I fully realized what it would look like, and I am not entirely sure when understanding that changed what I was willing to do.”
“And the kissing?”
“And the kissing.” Sawyer’s chin came up. “I’m not apologizing for any of that.”
“I wasn’t asking you to apologize. I’m asking you to explain what it meant.”
“I pulled away on the ridge because… because I have a company with more than three thousand employees and a board that has been watching this Phoenix Ridge situation for months. I have a legal agreement with a timeline and a developmentproject I’ve been building toward for three years. And none of that”—her words seemed to catch in her throat—“none of it tells me what to do about the fact that I cannot stop thinking about you.”
Nellie’s heart behaved terribly. She told it to knock it off.
“I want to untangle it.” Sawyer sighed. “All of it. Not in a way that leaves someone hurt at the end of it. I just haven’t figured out how to do that yet. And the kissing… well, the kissing hasn’t left me in my peak problem-solving condition.”
“I hear that.” Nellie chuckled.
Sawyer uncrossed her arms. She moved to the couch and sat down in the space beside Nellie. Not beside as in politely adjacent, but beside as in close, close enough that Nellie could feel the dampness of Sawyer’s jacket start to seep into her sweatpants.
“I know,” Sawyer said quietly, “that I have no right to ask you.”
“For what?”
“Your trust. I’ve earned ambiguity, at best. I know that.”
Nellie considered that for a moment. She thought about the backup generator and the canisters of fuel, the boundary markers reset to their original positions, the knock on the cottage door when the lights had gone out. She thought about every time Sawyer had walked away and then come back. She thought about the fact that she was currently sitting in a soaking wet jacket on Nellie’s couch because she’d seen the power cut and grabbed her keys.
“You’re an absolute nightmare,” Nellie muttered.
Sawyer’s mouth curved. “So I’ve been told.”
“You’ve given me about nine different versions of yourself in mere weeks.”
“Possibly.”
“You kissed me.”
“You wanted me to.”
“You moved my survey boundary.”
“I moved it back.”
