He picked it up. He turned it once, examining the structural integrity of the buttercream with genuine scientific focus. He set it back inside the carrier.
"Your menu board," he said.
She looked at her chalkboard. "What about it?"
"It says 'treats.'"
"Cupcakes are treats. That's what I sell. It's accurate."
"It doesn't list ingredients, allergens, or pricing tiers."
"It lists pricing. Right there." She looked at his board, which listed seven tomato varieties, their flavor profiles, their approximate acidity on what appeared to be an actual scale, their ideal culinary applications, and whether they were currently at peak ripeness or approaching it. In two colors of chalk. With what she was fairly sure were consistent margins. "Your board is a graduate seminar."
"My board gives customers information."
"My customers are here for joy. They don't need a syllabus."
He turned back to his tomatoes. She turned back to her display. They worked in the charged silence.
The market opened at eight. It was, Ivy thought, genuinely the best kind of crowd: a farmers market crowd on an early summer morning, unhurried and purposeful all at once, people who knew what they were looking for and were also opento being surprised. She recognized faces she hadn't seen in a decade and found, to her mild alarm, that they recognized her back.
"Ivy Lopez?" Steph Laurello, who had sat behind her in junior English and borrowed her notes for an entire semester without returning them. Now apparently a mother of three, friendly, genuinely glad to see her. They talked for four minutes about nothing in particular.
Ten minutes later, it was Caitlin Marsh.
Caitlin had the preserved quality of someone who had decided in high school that she'd peaked and was committed to maintaining that position. She arrived at the booth in a cloud of expensive silk, took in the display with the smile of a woman conducting an assessment, and said, "Oh my gosh, Ivy Lopez. I heard you were back." A pause timed with precision. "After the TV thing didn't work out."
There it was.
"Just for the summer," Ivy said pleasantly. "Trying something new."
"Of course." Caitlin's eyes moved to the display. "This is so cute. Very cottage-core."
"The brown butter cupcakes are good. You should try one."
Caitlin's gaze had already shifted to Finn. The pivot was so smooth it might have been choreographed. "Finn Hargrove. I haven't seen you since the harvest social last fall. How's the ranch?"
"Fine," Finn said.
"I've been meaning to come out and see the operation. I've heard the tours are — "
"We don't do tours," he said. Back to the tomatoes. "The Cherokee Purples are at peak if you want them."
Caitlin's smile tightened by approximately two millimeters. "I'll think about it," she said, and moved on with the grace of someone who had decided to leave rather than be dismissed.
Ivy gave Finn a nod of respect. "Four words."
"What?"
"You shut that down in four words. I've been workshopping comebacks for IG comments I got back in 2022, and I've never landed one that clean."
"There wasn't anything to land," he said. "She was wrong."
He was writing something on a card with a black marker, calm as still water. More customers came to both their trucks, and they fell into the business of commerce. The Nutritional Info Incident began, as many things did, with Ivy having an idea and no one present to stop her.
Around nine-thirty, when the first rush had settled into a steady stream, she taped a laminated card to the front of her display. She'd made it bent over the counter of the apartment she'd rented for the summer last night on the dot matrix printer in the format of a standard nutrition label:
Nutritional Facts:
