“Celebrate what?”
“Everything!” Nellie spread her free arm wide, taking in the clearing and the trees and the perfect rightness of being exactly where she was. “Eleanor is protected, you’ve overhauled your entire company to save the planet, I assume you’ve somehow managed to keep your position as CEO, and I won. I genuinely won, Sawyer, and I wanted to tell Eleanor.” She bit her lip. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“You were about to.”
“I was—” Sawyer paused, and Nellie was certain she was holding back a laugh. “Stay where you are.”
The call cut off. Nellie smiled at her phone and went to put the kettle on.
The thing was, she hadn’t actually expected Sawyer to come.
That was the part she was later, privately, unwilling to admit. She’d half-expected a follow-up text with a mild rebuke about leaving without a note or possibly a summary of the mineral water varieties she’d failed to appreciate because that was the register in which Sawyer operated when she wanted to be affectionate and needed it to look like something else. What she had not expected, after approximately sixty minutes of sipping tea and watching the light move across the forest floor, was the quiet sound of car tires on the dirt track.
Nellie sat up straighter in the camping chair and squinted at the approach.
Sawyer climbed out of her car with a bag over her shoulder. Not a briefcase, not the slim leather portfolio she carried everywhere like an appendage. A soft bag, the kind you packed for a weekend.
“You came,” Nellie said, bewildered, because this was apparently the level of articulate she was operating at.
“Why else would I have asked where you were?” The affectionate smile on her face was a million miles from the icy scowl she had deployed the first time she had pulled up to this particular spot. “Also, you left my apartment without telling me.”
“I left a note!”
“You left a drawing of a bird.”
“That was a goodbye. It was an illustrated goodbye.” Nellie stood from the camping chair, because it felt strange to have this conversation with Sawyer standing over her, even if Sawyer was making a valiant effort to look like her presence in the forest carrying an overnight bag was an entirely routine situation. “What’s in that?”
Sawyer set the bag down beside the van. “Necessities.”
Nellie looked at it. At Sawyer. At the bag again. “Sawyer?”
“You said you’d parked Dolores out here. I wasn’t going to show up without—” She reached into the bag. Pulled out, first, a toothbrush still in its cardboard packaging. Then a folded stack of fabric in a dark green.
Nellie took the fabric and unfolded it.
It was fleece pajamas. A full set. With a small embroidered ‘S’ on the breast pocket.
“You packed fleece pajamas,” she said.
“I figured it gets cold here at night.” Sawyer was chewing on her cheek, as if she was uncomfortable with how sentimental this all looked.
“You packed your pajamas and drove into the forest to sleep in my van.”
“I packed necessities and came—” Sawyer stopped. The faintest line appeared between her brows. “Don’t make it a thing.”
“I’m not making it a thing.” Nellie was, absolutely, making it a thing. She pressed the folded pajamas against her chest. “You’re going to sleep in Dolores.”
“That appears to be the plan.”
“My bed is significantly narrower than your bed.”
“I assumed so.”
“And I only have a camp stove for cooking.”
“Mm.”
