A scrub jay landed on the rock with Paloma’s mug, flitting its gaze between the two of them as if it were watching a tennis match.
Nellie stared at the bird until it lost interest and flew away again. “I’m a disaster.” She sighed. “Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Paloma nodded and retrieved her mug, now ready to settle into the matter. “Tell me about it.”
“I guess I knew what I was getting into,” Nellie mumbled. “That’s the thing. I’m not even— I can’t be angry about it, because I knew exactly what she was.” She stretched her legs out in front of her, boots dusty, the knees of her hiking trousers stained green. “I knew who she was before I ever walked into that office. She’s a cloud storage CEO who builds data centers. That’s literally her whole job description. I didn’treallyexpect anything different.”
“Mm.”
“And I fell for her anyway.” She said it plainly because there was no version of this conversation in which she was going to be coy about it—not with Paloma, not at this point. “I fell for herknowingthat. I watched her be brilliant and complicated and occasionally infuriating, and I thought, ‘oh, well, this isprobably fine, she’s difficult but—’” Nellie made a sound that was approximately a laugh. “And it was fine… up until it wasn’t.”
Paloma looked out over the ridge and chewed on the inside of her cheek. She’d spent the last three weeks, Nellie knew, working very hard to avoid sayingI told you so, and the effort was visible.
“I know I don't have the right to be angry,” Nellie added.
Paloma snorted. “Why can’t we be angry at the people actively destroying our planet?”
“Well, okay, you’re right on that one. But I meant I don’t think I have the right to be angry at Sawyer when I knew who she was before I got emotionally invested, I guess.”
“Fair point.” Paloma nodded. “But you’re allowed to be disappointed. You’re not delusional for thinking that your relationship might have had an impact on Sawyer’s outlook.” She waved her hand at the view. “You’re not crazy for hoping she’d start to see the Earth through your eyes.”
Nellie watched the lumps of undissolved cocoa floating around in her drink. She’d spent almost three weeks trying to justify her own feelings to herself, to rationalize. Having Paloma put it all out there with straight logic was no small relief.
“So,” Paloma went on, clearly on a roll with the whole best-friend-spitting-factsshtick. “Are you really angry that Sawyer Alburn is carrying on with life, business as usual? Or are you actually just hurt that she didn’t prioritize your feelings enough to turn everything upside-down?”
“Well, shit, that’s a question and a half,” Nellie muttered.
The scrub jay came back. Sat on the same rock. Tilted its head with the same curious expression. Predictable. Nellie watched it and thought, not for the first time in the last eighteen days, that what she felt was something more complicated than either word really covered. Anger she could work with, could channel into her campaign to save the planet. Hurt implied injury, implied a wound she couldn’t close just with logic anda fierce pep talk. What she actually felt was more like a jarring impact. Like she’d run headfirst into something that was always going to be there, completely visible, and done it anyway, and now was knocked flat on her ass trying to work out what the hell she’d been thinking.
“Both,” she said. “Neither. I don’t know.” She swirled the cocoa in her mug and drank it cold, grimacing slightly. “I know that we had something real. I know that. I’m not confused about it. Sawyer isn’t— People think she’s made of stone, but she’s not. She’s made of something that just looks like stone until you get close enough to see it isn’t.” She squinted at the horizon and shook her head. “I’m just the idiot who got close enough.”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“I’m a little bit of an idiot.”
“You’re a romantic optimist in an activist’s clothing.” Paloma chuckled. “Which I know because I’ve watched you do it your entire adult life. You see something worth protecting and you protect it, even when it’s complicated, even when the odds are bad.” She inhaled a deep breath and blew it back out slowly. “That’s not a flaw. It just doesn’t work out every time.”
“And that’s where I’m at, I guess. It just won’t work out this time. I don’t know how to be with someone when we’re going to be at each other’s throats about the thing that matters most to me. Because she’s going to keep building, and I’m going to keep fighting, and eventually one of us is going to look at the other across that line and realize that love isn’t actually enough to fix a fundamental?—”
Nellie caught herself.
The word had come out before she could stop it. She heard it land between them in the dry mountain air and couldn’t take it back, and also, she realized, she didn’t particularly want to.
Paloma said nothing for a long moment. Then, “Well…”
“I know.” Nellie groaned.
“That’s...”
“It’s incredibly inconvenient.”
“Damn right it is.” Paloma uncurled herself from the camp chair and stood, stretching her arms above her head. Her shadow fell long and thin across the dirt track like some looming spirit came to walk with Nellie through ghosts of romances past. “I think you’re right about the fundamental incompatibility. And I also think it’s one of the hardest things in the world, to admit that two people can develop real, genuine”—she glanced at Nellie—“love for each other and still be the wrong fit. That the feelings are true and the timing and the context and the basic facts of who you both are can still just…not work.” She dropped her arms. “There’s no one to blame for that. It’s just a tragedy, really, when it happens.”
Nellie folded her arms and pouted at the mountains. “You’re supposed to be making me feel better.”
“I’m helping you process.” Paloma crouched beside her best friend’s chair. “Which is a different thing, and in my experience leads to actually feeling better eventually, rather than just temporarily less bad.” She planted a kiss on Nellie’s cheek and laid her head on her shoulder. “You’re going to be okay. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Nellie said. She meant it. She’d been out here long enough to know she wasn’t broken, just rearranged somewhat. Something had cracked in her chest and hadn’t quite settled back into its original position yet, but she was not, she was fairly confident, catastrophically damaged. She had the mountains. She had the birds. And she had four kinds of soup courtesy of the best person she knew.
