He filed the yield sheets. He made coffee. He opened his laptop.
He told himself he was reviewing her content for partnership due diligence, which was true, and opened her vlog channel, which was also true, and navigated past the clips that featured him.
He'd seen those. He'd seen them more times than he intended to and had no plans to add to the count. He found the series listed on her channel archive asFrom Scratch.
The thumbnails were different from the market content. Less styled, longer run times, the titles straightforward:Making My Grandmother's Apple Cake; What I Changed and Why. OrThe Bread I Ruined Four Times: An Essay on Caramel. OrWhy Failure is Actually the Whole Point of Baking.
He opened the first one.
She was in the kitchen of a city apartment, making itself known in the background. No ring light. No styled surface. She was making something with brown butter and talking about it the way he narrated the row notes to himself: with the attention of someone who had no audience in mind and no plan to acquire one.
"The thing about brown butter," she said, tilting the pan, "watching the milk solids color, is that you can't do it from a distance. You have to stick with it. You can't walk away and come back. It goes from perfect to ruined in about forty-five seconds, and the difference is whether you were paying attention."
Finn watched the pan. He watched her watch the pan.
"My grandmother made it from memory. She'd been making it for sixty years, and she still stood at the stove as if it was the first time. I used to think that was inefficiency. I think now it was respect."
He watched three episodes before he closed the laptop.
She talked about food the way he grew it. That was an accurate description, and he sat with it for a moment because it was true and it was inconvenient, and he was constitutionally unable to ignore accurate descriptions. The specificity was the same. The quality of attention — the thing that didn't perform, that just looked and reported — was the same. She'd arrived at itfrom a different direction, through baking and sugar rather than soil and seed, but the destination was the same place.
Hm, he thought, which was not a complete thought, and went to find Boyd.
Boyd was in the barn doing something with the irrigation manifold that he'd apparently decided needed doing at seven p.m. on a weeknight.
"Brandywines are final. Twenty-three percent down."
Boyd set down the wrench. He turned around with the expression of a man who'd been prepared for this. "What are we going to do about it?"
"Pretend to date Ivy Lopez."
Boyd held up his left hand. "I'm taken, buddy."
Finn nodded gravely. "Which is why I'm going to do it."
"You're serious?"
"Mrs. Patel's proposal has practical merit. The judges responded to the coverage. The coverage responds to the—" he gestured, which was not a word, but Boyd understood it.
"To you and Ivy."
"To the market dynamics, yes."
Boyd picked the wrench back up and turned it in his hand. "You've done harder things," he said, "than pretend to like someone."
"I don't have to pretend to like her. Her palate is legitimate. Her approach to the work is legitimate. I have documented evidence of both. Liking her professionally isn't a performance." He looked at the manifold. "The scheme is about the optics. The cameras. The — moments. That's the performance piece. The underlying professional regard is real."
Boyd looked at him for a long moment with an expression that Finn recognized asI am going to remember this conversation for years.
"Sure," Boyd said.
"It's a meaningful distinction."
"Absolutely."
"The exit clause is the important part. If either of us wants to stop, we stop. I'm going to make that a condition."
"Very practical."
