“We have the technical capability to build infrastructure that most energy companies don’t have the expertise to construct,” Sawyer continued. “We also have a climate crisis accelerating on a timeline that nobody in the sector has seriously engaged with from a first-mover position.” She kept her tone calm, her delivery clean; this was the version where she didn’t need to convince Josie she was right, only that being right would be profitable. “We do this now, and we don’t get to be the company that eventually capitulates to regulatory pressure and retrofits its existing infrastructure at punishing costs. We get to be the company that built the model everyone else is eventually mandated to follow.”
The waiter arrived with the dessert menu. Josie waved it off with one hand without breaking eye contact with Sawyer.
“You’re talking about PR,” she said.
“I’m talking about legacy. Which, in my experience, the market tends to respect more than quarterly projections.”
Josie nodded at that. She picked up his wine glass, turned it once by the stem.
“You understand that getting Gina out of the opposition camp isn’t my job.”
“Gina’s capacity to call a vote is contingent on board support.” Sawyer smirked.
In response, Josie’s mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one. Josie knew exactly how much power she wielded and definitely enjoyed it. The two of them had that in common.
“The federal renewable credits,” Josie said. “You have those figures granular? By site?”
“By site and by state. I can have the full breakdown on your desk before the close of business today.”
“That should do it.” She raised his glass. “Patricia’s easier after a good document. Danielle is easier after Patricia. The others will barely need a light nudge.”
Sawyer raised her own drink. The wine was delicious, and the clink of crystal was quietly, absurdly satisfying. She let herself feel it. The addictive pleasure of a room that had been turned before she’d finished her main course.
“You really think this saves the world?” Josie asked. She wasn’t mocking her; the question landed with a genuine, slightly baffled sincerity. Just like Sawyer, she had lived her life inside the financial logic of growth and was only now beginning to suspect there might be a larger equation she’d been solving wrong.
Sawyer thought about a woman chained to an ancient tree, explaining the mycorrhizal network to nineteen thousand strangers.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that it saves my conscience. Everything else is a side benefit.”
Josie smiled properly this time. It reached her eyes. “I’ll have them all on our side by this evening.”
The valet back at home murmured a polite greeting, and Sawyer strode through the main doors feeling, for the first time in three weeks, like she could stand up straight.
She’d done it. She’d done the thing that she had been turning over in her head since the moment she’d watched Nellie walk outof her office, and she had done it in a way that meant it would hold—not a concession dragged out of her by an argument, not a PR gesture designed to appease a headline, but a structural decision made at the right level, sold on the right terms, with the right person. Alburn Systems was going to redirect its entire expansion strategy toward renewable energy. Josie Barfield was going to clear the board by tonight. And Gina Marsh was, simply, done.
She felt extraordinarily, unreasonably pleased with herself.
The next order of business felt exponentially more daunting. She wanted to tell Nellie.
She hadn’t quite worked out how. The calls she’d made over three weeks had gone unanswered and she’d accepted that, but leaving a voicemail felt too impersonal, too disconnected. This announcement required Nellie’s face, across some negotiable distance, with the possibility of a real response.
The lobby was cool, hushed, illuminated by the sunlight reflected off the almost blinding marble floor. Sawyer headed toward the elevators, heels clicking in the silence, and pulled her phone out to check what Martha had forwarded from the afternoon’s correspondence.
She almost walked past without looking.
But something made her look up. Some peripheral register, something not quite right in the familiar geometry of the space. The lobby had its usual presences: the concierge at his desk, the glossy indoor ficus in its sculptural planter, the cream leather sofa beside the elevator bank. The sofa always sat empty. Nobody used the sofa. It was not a sofa designed to be sat on so much as a sofa designed to demonstrate that sitting was possible in this building if you were wealthy enough to consider it optional.
Someone was sitting on it.
She was perched on the very edge—barely on it at all—as if she had calculated the exact minimum surface area required and was trying to honor it. Her boots were flat on the floor, knees together, canvas bag clenched in her lap with both hands, and she was staring at the elevator doors with a faintly compressed expression, lips pressed together, in the grip of a negotiation she was having entirely with herself about whether to keep sitting.
Sawyer stopped in her tracks.
She had been trying for weeks to figure out what she would say when she finally had the opportunity to say something. She had composed and discarded approximately forty versions of a script. Some had been too formal, the kind of language she used to terminate vendor contracts. Some had been the opposite of formal in a way that had alarmed her sufficiently to stop thinking entirely. None of them had accounted for Nellie Fuller turning up uninvited in the lobby of her building, perched awkwardly on the edge of the decorative sofa as if she was worried about leaving a stain.
Nellie hadn’t noticed her yet. Sawyer took the opportunity to simply drink in the miraculous sight.
Then Nellie’s eyes moved from the elevator doors, made a vague, restless pass over the lobby—she had clearly been periodically diverting her attention to all possible entrances—and landed on her.
