“Of course,” Sawyer said it without inflection. “Take all the time you need today to recover from your adventures. You appear to be quite worn out.”
Nellie laughed—full bellied and unashamed—and Sawyer had an acute and inconvenient awareness that she needed to be in her car now, on the road, several miles in any direction from this clearing. She turned without a closing remark and started back across the dirt.
She heard Nellie chattering away to her viewers immediately. She did not look back.
The deputy was hovering at the perimeter. “Ms. Alburn, should I?—”
“You’re done here, Deputy. The matter’s been resolved.”
The seat was cold when Sawyer climbed back into her car. She sat for a moment with the engine idling and processed what had just happened. She was rigorous about taking an inventory of events. They were how she’d survived a childhood that should have been a ceiling rather than a floor, how she’d built a company from a shared desk and a hospital contract in Tacoma, and how she’d made twenty-eight acquisitions without a single one going catastrophically sideways.
Inventory: Sawyer Alburn had just conditionally offered to abandon an eighty-million-dollar development project to a woman chained to a tree. She had done it in front of nineteen thousand people because it was, all things considered, a rational de-escalation that bought the project protected procedural ground if Nellie Fuller failed to make her case.
That was why.
She pulled onto the access road.
The phone rang through the speakers not two minutes later. Martha.
Sawyer let it ring once more than she normally would before she answered.
“How did it go?” Martha’s question was very carefully positioned between curiosity and professional neutrality, which meant she’d already read the stream.
A long pause.
“I think I just made a deal with a tree-hugger.”
Silence. Then, perfectly dry: “Adeal?”
“Don’t.”
Sawyer ended the call and stared at the road and tried not to think about the way Nellie Fuller had smiled at her.
3
CHAPTER 3 – NELLIE
Getting herself out of the chain took Nellie four minutes, a key she’d been storing in her bra in case she was faced with a pat down, and a level of manual dexterity that had never once made it onto her resume but probably should. The padlock clicked open. She coiled the chain, tucked the padlock into the front pouch of her backpack, and pressed her free palm flat against Eleanor’s bark—just for a second—before her phone vibrated to life in her pocket.
Paloma: Nellie
Paloma: Nellie WHAT DID YOU DO
Paloma: YOU SAID YES TO A DEAL WITH SAWYER ALBURN???
Paloma: I NEED YOU TO CALL ME IMMEDIATELY. I AM STANDING ON THE SIDE OF A ROAD. I HAVE A BREAKFAST BURRITO IN MY HAND THAT IS GETTING COLD. CALL ME RIGHT NOW.
Then a voice note. Fifty-three seconds long.
Nellie pressed play.
What followed was not, strictly speaking, a coherent language of any sort. There was a stretch of something in Spanish that she caught enough of to know was unflattering, then a long pause that might have been Paloma collecting herself but was probably just her driving while furious, then a section that appeared to be directed at the breakfast burrito specifically—and now this is COLD, this is BECAUSE OF YOU—before the recording cut out mid-syllable.
Nellie sent back a string of rainbow hearts.
Paloma: DO NOT SEND ME HEARTS RIGHT NOW.
Nellie: I’ll explain everything when you get here
