She blew.
Twenty-nine out. A second breath took the final six. Paloma clapped once and went back to the wine.
“What did you wish for?”
“Can’t tell you.” Nellie smiled privately at the thin smoke curling from the wicks. “Otherwise it won’t come true.”
By the second bottle, the best friends had settled into their natural rhythm: the one they found reliably after the seriousportion of the evening had concluded and they were back in safe, well-mapped territory. Paloma had stopped looking worried. Or rather, she’d filed the worried face in its usual place for later retrieval, which was how she operated; she could be genuinely afraid for you and still decide, pragmatically, that additional wine was the correct intervention for the moment.
“Come on, tell me about your report,” she demanded again. She’d dragged Nellie over to the couch by this point, and pulled her feet up under her, wine glass propped on her knee.
Nellie lit up.
She couldn’t help it. Her face did the thing it did every time someone opened the door to this particular topic. It was a sort of involuntary animation, like a light switching on behind her eyes, which Paloma had once described asthe big tree faceand which Nellie maintained was a completely normal and professional expression of scientific enthusiasm.
“I’m almost done,” she announced. “Another week, maybe.” She unfolded herself from the couch corner and reached across the coffee table for her site map, because she could never discuss the riparian corridor without pointing at things. “Look. The whole northern quadrant—this section here, running along the main channel—functions as a connected wildlife corridor between two habitat patches that everyone thought were isolated. Which means anything moving between the upper slope and the lowland wet areas is using this creek as a throughway. Small mammals, amphibians, probably a few bat species I haven’t confirmed yet.”
“Bats?”
“Bats are essential, Paloma.”
“I know bats are essential. I’ve heard the bat speech before.” She swatted Nellie away as if she were a fly buzzing in her ear. Even so, Paloma was leaning forward, looking at the map with genuine attention, because she always did. Because she mighttease Nellie aboutthe big tree face,but she’d also been the one on the phone every time one of the campaigns had gone wrong, crying along in a way that had nothing to do with amphibians and everything to do with understanding what they meant. “Go on.”
“There’s macroinvertebrate diversity in those lower riffles that I wasn’t expecting. It’s not just species presence; it’s the distribution pattern that matters. It tells you about water quality, bank stability, the whole upstream condition. You can read the health of an entire watershed from a cup of creek water if you know what you’re looking for.” Nellie smoothed the edge of the map and felt that familiar pride. The feeling was impossible to put into words unless you’d stood knee-deep in a cold creek at seven in the morning with your fingers going numb and felt, despite everything, as though the world was telling you something important. “This corridor is healthy. And it’s rare. Old-growth associated, intact hydrology, and it connects across what would otherwise be a break between two protected areas.” She looked up. “If it gets bulldozed for server infrastructure, that connection is gone. It doesn’t come back in a century. Maybe not in two.”
Paloma was quiet for a moment. “Your report is going to say all that?”
“My report is going to say it with twenty pages of data tables and a really compelling map.”
“Nice!Give her hell, Fuller.”
Nellie grinned and clinked her wine glass against Paloma’s offered one. She had lost count of how many she’d had, but she reached for the bottle again anyway.
The cake was, on reflection, the best cake Nellie had eaten in years. She said this aloud, at volume, after her second slice, and Paloma received the praise with deeply warranted satisfaction,having scouted several bakeries before decided on the perfect choice.
The third bottle was open soon enough. The fire in the woodstove had been tended and was doing its best work to stave off the lingering dampness in the air after the storm. Somewhere in the late hour, the mood had shifted irrevocably into the warm, fuzzy territory that Nellie privately thought of as good wine o’clock. This was distinguishable from regular wine time by the fact that everything Paloma said was significantly funnier than it had been an hour ago, and Nellie’s own thoughts had acquired a pleasant, manageable quality. No sharp edges, no anxious inventories, just the agreeable company of her best friend and ten excellent balloons.
Paloma was mid-story about a disastrous date she’d been on a few days ago involving a woman who’d turned out to have deeply confident opinions about the geological record, despite being an accountant. Nellie was laughing so hard her eyes were watering.
“She said the Jurassic was”—Paloma made a gesture that encompassed the sheer cosmic scale of the wrongness—“controversial.”
“Controversial.” Nellie wheezed. “The Jurassic? What does that even mean?”
“Like it was a live debate. Like the dinosaurs were still in arbitration.”
Nellie dissolved again. She pressed her forehead against the back of the couch and shook with laughter until her ribs hurt.
When she lifted her head again, Paloma was smiling at her with the kind of affection that came from ten years of this: the late nights and the wine and the stupid, irreplaceable laughter.
“I love you.” Nellie sighed.
“I love you too.” Paloma tucked her wine glass into the crook of her elbow and closed her eyes. “This couch is extraordinarily comfortable, by the way.”
“I know. It’s served me well… if you know what I mean.”
No response. Nellie had expected a response to that one. She tilted her head. Paloma’s breathing had gone slow and even.
“Pal?”
