"It's extraordinary." She said it the way she'd said things in theFrom Scratchseries, without ego, just looking at the thing and reporting. "You know that."
He did know that. He also knew that he'd given her the first ripe fruit from the vine he'd been checking since August, and she'd eaten it over his planting trough and called it extraordinary, and the word had landed differently than he'd expected.
"I want to get some content," Ivy said. She was already reaching into her bag. "For the vlog. While we're in here."
"Fine," he said.
She had the phone on its small tripod in under a minute, angled to catch both of them against the backdrop of the trial row. She shook her hair out, checked the frame, and looked at him.
"Just talk normally," she said. "Pretend it's not there."
He looked at the phone. "It's there."
"Finn."
"I'm aware that it's there."
She pressed record anyway.
"Hey everyone," she said, and the voice shifted — half an octave up — "so I am here at The Purple Heart Ranch Farm in the most incredible greenhouse with Finn, who grows literally the best tomatoes I have ever tasted." She glanced at him. He was standing with his arms crossed, looking directly into the camera as if it had done something to him personally. "Finn, say hi."
"Hi," he said. To the camera. Like a man reading from a card.
Ivy smiled the smile of someone recalibrating. "Finn is going to tell us about these varieties." She gestured at the trial row. "In his own words. Finn."
He looked at the plants. Looked at the phone. "They're tomatoes."
"Great. Really great. Very illuminating." She looked back at him with an expression of professional patience that was doing very little to hide the fact that she found this funny.
He tried again. "We're developing new varieties for climate adaptation. The idea is to —" He stopped, searched for the words. "There are existing heirlooms that were developed for specific regional conditions, and the goal is to—" He stopped again.
This was not how he talked about this. He talked about this every day, to Boyd, to himself at five in the morning in the fields,and it did not sound like this. It sounded like something he knew. This sounded like a presentation.
The camera was still running.
"You know what's interesting," Ivy said, leaning against the potting bench with her arms crossed, head tilted, wearing the expression of someone about to say something they'd prepared, "these are very small. For tomatoes that are supposedly so special."
Finn looked at the trial pots. "They're not at full?—"
"I've seen bigger tomatoes," she said, examining her nails. "At the grocery store, actually. Much bigger. Very red."
"Those are commercially grown for size and shelf stability; they have the flavor profile of wet cardboard, and comparing them to an heirloom trial variety is like comparing a photograph of a meal to an actual…"
Ivy was looking at him with her chin down and her eyes up, and a smile she was working very hard to keep contained.
He narrowed his eyes.
She smiled wider. Completely unrepentant.
"You did that on purpose," he said.
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Tell me more about the wet cardboard."
And somehow — he hadn't planned it, couldn't have accounted for it — he laughed. Short, genuine, surprised out of him.
She was close, and she was looking at him with something that wasn't the audience expression and wasn't the professional expression, and wasn't any expression he'd catalogued yet.
Finn looked at her mouth. It was a very brief look. The kind that happened before the conscious mind had a chance to weigh in on whether it was a good idea.
