"Are you going?"
"I don't know yet."
"Devon is a legible person," Roz said. "He's clear as graphite. There's nothing complicated about him. The complicated part is you, not him. You know what you want. Or rather, what you don't want."
"I've known since before that," Ivy said, without planning to.
"Yeah," Roz said quietly.
"I don't want to work for him. I don't want to work for anybody."
"I'm guessing you like workingwithsomeone."
Ivy let out a long sigh.
"Don't answer Devon's email today. Don't answer it tomorrow either. Answer it after Saturday, when you know what you're telling him."
"What will I be telling him after Saturday?"
"I think you'll know," Roz said, and changed the subject to a piece she was editing, and they talked for twenty minutes about someone else's work, which was a relief.
After she hung up, Ivy swiped over to the post. It was still performing. She could see the numbers climbing in the background tab without opening it, the small favicon updating like a pulse. Eleven hundred words about coming back to a place you left, and what attention looked like when it wasn't a performance, and a man who grew things and was, without meaning to, teaching her something she hadn't known she needed to learn.
She swiped out of the post and over to the Photos icon on her phone. Ivy pulled up the video. It started mid-motion—her laugh, the clatter of the spoon, the flick of sauce—and then the moment.
His hand. Her cheek. The pause that hadn’t felt like a pause at the time. And then?—
His thumb.
Her breath caught again, as if her body remembered before her mind caught up. The slow, deliberate way he brought it to his mouth. The way his lips closed around his finger.
It would do well. She knew it would. People loved this kind of thing—unscripted, unpolished, and hot. So hot.
She could already hear the comments. They'd call him Tomato Daddy. Taddy?
Instead, she tapped the menu. Saved it. In a private folder.
Her thumb lingered there, just for a second. Then she closed her phone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Finn had the compote idea on Thursday.
He started developing the Cherokee Purple compote for the menu the same day. A reduced component whose sweetness would be concentrated with a small amount of local honey and a single sprig of thyme. Even though he'd compromised with Ivy's brown butter in their shared recipe, he couldn't work with it on his own. He'd made three test batches, and on the third one he'd gotten it right.
The compote wanted a fat base beneath it and something caramelized and salty that cut richness, and those were not the flavor conditions of his menu. Those were the flavor conditions of Ivy's.
On Saturday he arrived at the rally at five and noticed within twenty minutes that Ivy's display had something new: small cards tucked beside three of the items that read, in her market handwriting, featuring Cherokee Purple from Boots & Roots.
It was a compote.
Once again, they had arrived at the same place from different directions without discussing it, which was a pattern he'd stopped finding surprising.
She came around the partition between their setups with a tasting cup. "A compote."
"You put yours on a blondie," he said.
"You put yours on cornbread."
