He thought about every time Ivy had reached for her phone and then put it away. Every time she'd framed a shot and then not taken it. The four photographs in the greenhouse that she'd mentioned, once, that she'd never posted. The way she'd shown up to their date with a purse too small to fit a phone and saidthe important people know I'm with you.
He pulled up outside her apartment at half-past eight and sat for a moment.
Then he got out, went to the door, and knocked.
Nothing.
He knocked again. Waited. Looked up at the windows. No movement, no shadow, no light behind the curtains that would have suggested someone was in there, choosing not to answer. He stepped back and looked at the building and felt the deflation of a man who had been carrying something and arrived at the destination only to find it empty.
The truck sat at the curb behind him, pink and repaired and waiting, the keys in his hand.
He looked at them.
He pulled out his phone. No answer.
His only thought was that she was already gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Devon's hotel room had a view of the Valor town square that she suspected he'd requested specifically, because Devon Park did not leave details to chance. There was coffee on the table — good coffee, not the hotel kind, which meant he'd sent someone out — and a folder, and a laptop open to a slide deck that had clearly been prepared before he'd knocked on the truck window, which told her everything she needed to know about how this conversation had been planned.
Ivy sat across from him with her hands around the coffee cup and let him talk.
He was good at this. She'd always known that about Devon — the way he could take a set of numbers and make them feel like a story, make them feel like your story, like the data had looked at you specifically and decided you were the answer. Demographics. Engagement rates. The viral clip's reach broken down by age and region, and the quality of attention the comments section had shown, which Devon described as a parasocial investment at an unusually high threshold, which meant: people cared.
"The male demographic alone," Devon said, pulling up a graph, "is three times what food content typically generates.And that's entirely him." He tapped the screen. "Finn brings an audience that food blogging doesn't normally touch. Veterans, agricultural communities, rural viewers who don't watch cooking content because cooking content doesn't look like anything they recognize. He's…"
Devon droned on. Ivy stopped listening.
She looked at the town square through the window. The market wasn't set up yet. But she could see the corner where the trucks parked, the double spot that had started all of this, and she thought about Finn at five in the morning with his chalk and his flavor notes and his three years of Cherokee Purples, and felt something fierce and specific move through her that she recognized, after a moment, as protectiveness.
She thought about his face on the sidewalk this morning.
That was the thing she kept coming back to, the thing that had followed her up the stairs and into the apartment and kept her awake until she'd given up on sleep entirely and called Devon at seven to sayI'm coming to you, stay there.The look on Finn's face when Devon said,both of you. The way he'd turned to her, and the calculation she'd watched him do — fast, quiet, the way he did everything — and the conclusion he'd reached, which she could read as clearly as his chalkboard handwriting.
He would have said yes.
She knew it with the certainty of someone who had been paying attention for weeks. He would have stood on that sidewalk and looked at her and said yes, because that was what Finn Hargrove did; he showed up for it completely, without half measures. He would have said yes to the cameras and the production schedule and the demographics and the slide decks, and all of it. He would have done it for her, and it would have cost him something he didn't understand. She'd paid that price, and she didn't want him to pay it. She didn't want to pay it a third time.
She had walked away to protect him from saying yes.
She wasn't sure he'd understood that. She wasn't sure, from the look on his face as the door closed, that it had read as protection rather than retreat.
"Ivy," Devon said carefully. "The offer is genuinely good."
"I know it's good."
"The production company has worked with talent before who wanted boundaries around their personal lives. There are ways to structure the content so that?—"
"Devon." She set the coffee down. "Do you know why the clips work?"
He waited.
"Because we're not performing," she said. "The tomato argument. The chalkboard. The greenhouse video. None of that was produced. None of it was structured or optimized or run through a focus group. It worked because it was real. The second we put a production budget behind it and a camera crew and a network note about the demographic we're trying to reach—" she stopped. "It stops being real. And people will feel that. They always feel that."
Devon looked at her for a long moment. "And the other reason," he said quietly.
She looked at the window.
