He didn't mention that there had been a relationship. He now doubted it had been anything but a fling —at least in Sloan's eyes.
Mrs. Patel arrived a few minutes later with a two-person news crew. It was a local station, a human-interest segment, Valor's Tomato Couple at their usual spot — two minutes of footage, she'd said on the phone, natural and unscripted.
The crew came in and found their angles with the unobtrusive efficiency of people who covered community events for a living. Finn looked at Ivy. Ivy looked at him. The micro-expression:your call.
He moved his chair.
Not far — a quarter turn, close beside her rather than across from her, the way two people sit when they're falling for each other. He set his recipe notes on the table between them, angled the pages toward her, and leaned in slightly as if explaining something.
Then he put his arm along the back of her chair. Not around her. Along the back of it, his forearm resting on the frame, which brought him close enough that if she leaned back, she would meet his arm. She didn't lean back. She leaned forward slightly, over the recipe notes, and tilted her head toward his, and their temples were close — not touching, close — while they appeared to review the recipe.
He was aware of her hair. It smelled sweet, like the brown butter she used to fatten up her treats. Finn couldn't stop inhaling, which was necessary because he had to breathe. But he inched closer and closer to the brown strands of her hair with each intake.
The crew moved. The camera found them. Mrs. Patel was looking at the monitor with the expression of someone getting exactly what they came for, and Finn sat with his arm along the back of Ivy's chair and talked about the verjuice ratio as though this were the ordinary situation and not one he was going to be thinking about at four-thirty a.m. when he woke up tomorrow.
Ivy's voice was even and warm, the professional version, and she talked about the recipe with genuine enthusiasm about the technique, and her shoulder was not touching his arm, but the distance was theoretical.
The segment took eleven minutes. For eleven minutes he sat with his arm on the back of her chair and their heads inclined toward each other over a recipe that was both of theirs, and he thought about the prize, and he thought about the restaurant, and he kept picturing Ivy in both of those scenarios. Would shestay after they won, because they would win? Or would she pack up her truck and go?
When the crew packed up and Mrs. Patel thanked them. He didn't move his chair back. Ivy collapsed back into his embrace and relaxed. Her phone was still face down on the table. There was no one in the bar watching them.
"I didn't see the video from last night," he said. "The one with the recipe." And the sauce, and his thumb, and her gasp.
"Oh?" was her only response as she finished her drink, still leaning back into his arm, which was braced around the chair.
After she finished her drink, she started gathering her things.
"I'll walk you," he said.
She looked at him. "It's six blocks."
He said nothing. She didn't argue.
The evening was on the warm side of cool; the summer heat finally releasing by nine o'clock. Valor at this hour was its quietest self; a few lights in the diner, the hardware store dark, the square empty in the comfortable way of a place that didn't need to be busy to be itself.
They talked about the recipe. He was not sure they were actually talking about the recipe, but the words were about the recipe.
She stopped at the door of her rental.
He stopped.
She turned and looked up at him, and he looked at her, and there was the ordinary beat of a goodbye — a second, maybe less — and then that beat passed, and neither of them had said anything, and there was another second. Two seconds past the situation's requirements.
Finn wanted to kiss her, to pull her into a hug and just hold her. But there was no one around. No cameras. No audience. Her phone was in her pocket, not asking for a performance.
"Good night, Ivy."
"Good night, Finn."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The post went up Thursday morning at nine. Ivy watched it move. Ten thousand views in an hour.
From Valor, Actually— Week Six was not the competition content, not the Tomato Couple content, not the market footage, or the fake-dating b-roll. It was a long one — eleven hundred words, more essay than post — about coming back to a place you left, and what you find when you return. A love letter to a farmers market in a Midwestern town on a weekday morning when the light comes from the east and the Cherokee Purples are at peak and a man who grows things for a living is teaching you, without meaning to, that attention is its own form of love.
She had not mentioned Finn by name. She hadn't needed to.
The comments were different from the viral clip comments. Less excited, more — held. People writing longer than people usually wrote in comment sections, about their own hometowns, their own returns, their own farmers’ markets and the things they'd found there that they hadn't expected. A woman in Ohio who'd moved back to care for her mother and found, to her surprise, that she didn't want to leave again. A man in Vermont who grew heirloom tomatoes and said she'd described the workfrom the outside the way he'd never been able to describe it from the inside.
