“I know what it means,” Sawyer snapped. “I wrote the Q3 target.”
“Then you understand why?—”
“Gina.” Sawyer looked at her. Just looked, with the stillness she’d spent twenty years calibrating, and waited for the sentence to die naturally. It did. “I understand the targets. I also built thiscompany, which means I have the authority to change where it’s going. That’s not a point for discussion.”
The room didn’t exactly bristle. It did something closer to a collective intake of breath that nobody quite released again.
Danielle put down her copy of the summary and looked at Josie Barfield. Josie looked at Patricia. Patricia looked at Gina. Gina looked at her leather portfolio and then, after clicking his pen a few times and making contact with precisely no one, she looked up at Sawyer.
“I think,” Gina said curtly, “in light of the strategic and financial implications of what’s being proposed, it might be appropriate for the board to consider calling a vote.”
Sawyer raised an eyebrow. “A vote on what?”
“A vote of no confidence.”
23
CHAPTER 23 – NELLIE
The car that came up the dirt track had a dent in the front quarter panel and a bumper sticker that saidBEES MATTERand Nellie felt, against her best judgment, enormously glad to see it.
She set down her book on rare mushrooms of eastern Asia and stood up from the rock she’d been using as a chair. The Phoenix Ridge foothills stretched behind Dolores in both directions, scrubland and dry grass giving way to the long ridgeline of mountains against the sky. It was the kind of landscape that rid the mind of any thoughts beyond pure awe. Nellie had been finding this extremely useful.
Paloma pulled up, cut the engine, and hauled out two overflowing grocery bags.
“You look like you’ve been living in a ditch,” she said, by way of hello.
“A very scenic ditch, don’t you think?” Nellie took one of the bags from her and peered inside: oat milk, a block of darkchocolate, three kinds of crackers, pasta, and what appeared to be four individual cans of soup.
“I know what you eat when left unsupervised.”
“I’ve been eating fine?—”
“Four kinds.” Paloma waggled a finger at her. “Because you can’t get all the nutrients you need from cream of tomato soup.” She looked at Dolores with the fond, vaguely appraising air she always brought to these visits, as though checking that the van hadn’t deteriorated. Dolores was, as ever, parked with her nose pointed toward the mountains, dish towel clipped across the windscreen for privacy mode.
Nellie grinned at her safe haven. “Fancy a hot cocoa?”
It took her approximately ten minutes to boil water on the camp stove, locate the tin of cocoa powder she kept in the overhead cabinet, rinse out two mugs, and assemble something that was arguably hot chocolate if you didn’t mind lumps too much. She handed Paloma a mug, and they unfolded the two camp chairs she kept bungee-corded to the back of Dolores and set them up facing the mountains.
“It’s good out here.” Nellie sighed, wrapping both hands around her mug.
Paloma looked at the ridgeline. “It is.”
“The air alone. You forget, in the city, that air is supposed to smell like this.” Nellie inhaled appreciatively. Pine, somewhere up the slope. The dry, faintly animal sharpness of scrubland. The particular smell that she always registered more in her lungs than her nose. “I ran eleven miles yesterday. I started a new monitoring report on the migratory bird situation in this sector, just for fun. I’ve been sleeping eight hours.”
Paloma sipped her cocoa.
“Good,” she said, somewhat pointedly.
Silence. Nellie knew that energy Paloma deployed when she had decided not to be the first one to say the actual thing.
“I’m fine,” Nellie added.
“I believe you.”
“I’mbetterthan fine. I’m?—”
“Nellie.” Paloma set her mug down on the flat rock between their chairs as if she was finally abandoning the whole charade. “You’ve been here almost three weeks. You haven’t spoken to another soul. I have been bringing you groceries because I know for a fact you’d survive on crackers for several days before you went back to civilization.” She tilted her head and arched a dark eyebrow. “I’m not here to make you feel bad about any of it. I’m just pointing out that these are not the actions of someone who is fine.”
