Her breath caught. Audible in the quiet of the greenhouse, under the soft sound of the irrigation system and the green-warm smell of growing things. Her tongue touched her lower lip — quick, unconscious — and she turned away. Her hand, reaching for the phone, was not entirely steady.
"So that's the trial row, everyone, and if you want to know more about why your grocery store tomatoes taste like disappointment, Finn is apparently very available to discuss that." She angled the phone toward him one more time. He was still watching her when he caught sight of himself on her phone screen.
"We'll see you next time. Bye."
She stopped the recording. The greenhouse was very quiet.
"Good," she said to the phone. "That was good."
"Mm," Finn said.
That was all he said as he walked her back to her truck. He said nothing else as he helped her into the truck, and she turned the ignition over. He said nothing as he watched her drive away. Forty minutes later, he checked her social media profile.
The video had passed a million views. New comments were popping up every few seconds. Apparently, other people had a lot to say.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"You can come in," Finn said from the counter without turning around.
"I was appreciating it."
"It's a kitchen."
"It's a really good kitchen."
Ivy looked around the ranch's community kitchen. The Mess Hall, they called it. Finn had told her that when he wasn't at his food truck or in the fields, he was in here making food for the men and women who came to stay at the ranch to find peace and healing from the wounds that combat and service had dealt them.
The ranch kitchen was larger than she'd expected and more serious, which she was beginning to understand was the pattern with everything on this property. Long prep counter in pale butcher block, a six-burner range that had been well-used and well-cleaned. Herbs grew in the window above the sink. Cast iron pans hung on the wall in order of size.
Ivy set her bag on the end of the counter and pulled out her notebook, which had four pages of competition ideas in two colors of ink, organized by category and then reorganized by instinct. "Okay. I've been thinking about structure. If the tomatois the center, everything else is about supporting it without competing with it. The flavor profile is low in acid, high in complexity. It's sweet, of course, but it wants a fat to carry it and an acid to frame it and something underneath with enough body that it doesn't float."
"Brown butter?" Finn wrinkled his nose.
"Brown butter," she said with a grin. "It has the same caramelized baseline as the tomato's sugar development; same flavor origin, different application. They'd run together."
"The acidic component is the problem."
"Champagne vinegar. Light enough to frame without?—"
"Too bright. It'll flatten the tomato's complexity." He turned to the range. "Verjuice."
"Oh?" She stopped and cocked her head to the side, considering.
"Unfermented grape juice. Local producers run it from the early press. The acid is present but rounded. It won't compete."
She wrote it down. "And the body component. I was thinking?—"
"White beans."
Ivy cocked her head in the other direction. "I would never have thought of using beans."
Finn pulled things from the refrigerator with the systematic efficiency of someone who had already thought about this more than he'd admitted to. Ivy experienced a brief wave of — not irritation exactly, more like the feeling of finding out someone had been reading the same book as you in secret and had gotten further.
"You've been thinking about this," she said.
"It's a competition."
"You've been thinking about it since before today."
