They went still. Ivy opened her eyes. Finn lifted his head.
Devon Park was standing on the sidewalk in a jacket that cost more than her monthly rent, looking in at them through the glass with an expression of careful neutrality that she recognized from every professional meeting they'd ever had. He raised one hand in a small, contained wave.
Ivy stared at him.
Finn stared at him.
Devon pointed at the window with a polite, patient gesture that saidWhen you have a moment.
Ivy looked at Finn. The easy warmth of the last twelve hours had not left his face entirely, but something had come into it — a stillness, a watchfulness, the particular quality of attention he gave to things he was assessing. His jaw had done the thing it did.
"I've been trying to reach you since midnight," he said to Ivy.
She reached back and found Finn's hand. His fingers closed around hers without hesitation. She felt something settle in her chest. Someone had her back.
"The network called," Devon said. "They're ready to green-light the show, Ivy. Full season order. They want an answer by Monday."
The morning was very quiet. Somewhere down the street a bird was doing something cheerful and uninformed about the situation.
Ivy knew she was supposed to feel cheerful at this news. Knew it was a cause to celebrate. To pump her fists into the air. She held onto Finn's hand, waiting for him to loosen his grip. To pull back. To do the reasonable, self-protective thing that shewould not have blamed him for, not with his history, not with everything she now knew about what leaving had cost him.
Finn's hand didn't move. His lips weren't turned down in a frown. He grinned at her —not a full grin, but one that was full of pride.
"Congratulations," he said. "This is what you've worked so hard for. I'm so proud of you."
She looked at him. At the steadiness of him in the early morning light, his vine bouquet on the dash, the frog visible through the truck window on the back seat.
"I want both," she said. "I want the show, and I want you."
"I'm not going anywhere," Finn said. "Except in front of my television to watch you cook. And… if you want…I'll come up a couple of weekends during taping. If that's allowed."
She laughed — sudden, helpless, the kind that came from relief moving through you too fast to do anything else with. She leaned up and kissed him, brief and certain, and felt him kiss her back with the same certainty, and she thought: this is what it feels like when something holds.
Behind them, Devon cleared his throat. "I think there's been a misunderstanding. They don't want a solo show. They want both of you. The Tomato Couple Cooking Show."
"Me?" Finn said at the same time that Ivy said, "No."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Finn was in the rows by five-thirty. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that he'd been awake since three, lying in the dark, pretending he was thinking of nothing, until he had given up and come out here because the rows were the only place he knew how to think.
He walked them in a daze. The Cherokee Purples were coming in heavy on the south end. He noted it without writing it down, which was not how he operated, which told him something about the state of his operating.
He'd been prepared. That was the thing he kept returning to, the thing that sat in the center of his chest like a stone he kept picking up and examining, and putting back down. He had stood on that sidewalk in the morning light and looked at Devon Park's lips moving, and he had decided.
Long distance was workable. Hundreds of miles was a number, and numbers were manageable. He would watch her on television and drive up on weekends and root for her from whatever distance the thing required, because that was what you did when something was worth it. Ivy Lopez was worth it.
He'd been prepared for her to go. He had not been prepared for her to say no.
Not to the long distance. Not to work something out. No to all of it; to Devon, to the show, to Finn, to the sidewalk, to the morning. She'd saidI need to thinkin a voice he'd never heard from her before and closed the door. It had shut, and that had been that.
He picked up a Cherokee Purple from the vine. Set it back down.
Had it been real? Had the two of them been real? Or had it been the fake relationship Mrs. Patel and the committee had cooked up?
The thought arrived sideways, in the dark, when his defenses were occupied elsewhere. He didn't want to think it. He thought it anyway, because he was a man who respected evidence, and the evidence was: she had walked away from a television show and from him in the same motion. Which suggested that neither was what she wanted. Which suggested that what she'd had here in Valor had been?—
He put the thought down. He walked the rows instead.
