"He doesn't know what this does to people," she said. "He doesn't know about the comments that aren't affectionate. The ones that pick you apart. He doesn't know about the production weeks that go sideways, or the network notes that want you to be a slightly different version of yourself, or the viewers who decide they own you because they watched you every week for a season." She looked back at Devon. "He knows how to protect me from things I can see coming. He has no idea about this."
Devon said nothing.
"And honestly?" Her voice came out quieter than she expected. "I realized, sitting up there at four in the morning… I don't want it for myself either." She looked at her hands. "I wanted the show because I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted someone with a network behind them to look at what I'd built and say it was enough." She paused. "But I've been in Valor for three months and I've made the best work of my career, and almost none of it has been online, and that's — that's been the point, Devon. That's been the whole point, and I've only just understood it."
The town square sat quiet in the morning light outside the window. The empty market corner. The double spot. And then her truck pulled into the spot, and Finn got out.
The Sugar and Spite truck sat in the double spot where it belonged, pink in the morning light, and it took her a moment to understand what was different about it because different wasn't the word she would have reached for first. The word she would have reached for first was still.
The truck was still. Not the resigned stillness of something that had broken down and given up. Not the waiting stillness of something about to make a noise it shouldn't. Just still. Parked and quiet and present in the way of something that had been looked after. She could see from the window that the paint on the Sugar and Spite logo was fresh, the cursive bright and clean in a way it hadn't been since she'd driven it off the lot three years ago. The bodywork on the rear panel — the scrape she'd been meaning to get seen to since April and had been ignoring with the focused determination of someone who had other problems — was gone. Smooth. Like it had never happened.
The truck looked new. Not new like it had just come from a factory; new like something had been given careful attention by someone who understood that the things you maintained were the things you intended to keep.
And then there was the matter of Finn himself.
He had come around to the driver's side door — her door — and stood there with the keys in his hand, not looking up at the window, not performing the delivery for anyone watching. Just a man who had driven her truck across town in the early morning because it needed to get to her and he was the one who could bring it. He was in yesterday's flannel. His boots had field mud on them, that meant he'd been in the rows before this, which meant he'd been up before dawn, which meant the truck had not been the first thing he'd done this morning, just the next thing.
"So what do you want?" Devon said. Not strategically. Just the question.
Ivy looked at the square for a long moment.
She thought about the Cherokee Purple tasted over a planting trough. The chalkboard with two sets of handwriting on it. A stuffed bear in the back of a truck and a frog on the dashboard, and a purse too small for her phone because there was no one else she'd wanted to talk to.
She thought about Finn walking his rows this morning, alone, trying to make evidence out of a closed door.
"I just want him."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Finn stood on the sidewalk between the Sugar and Spite truck and his own. The market set up around him. Dot and Clarence next door, the flower vendor across the way, the sound of the square coming to life in the way it did every weekend, familiar as his own fields.
He pulled out his phone and tapped on the social media app.
Her profile was the same. No new posts. The last thing she'd put up was days old. She hadn't even posted about the amusement park cotton candy, of which she’d eaten every bite. And he'd had two bites. Once because she held some out to him on her fingers. Second, because there was a remnant on her cheek and he couldn't help himself.
He scrolled back through it. The Mess House kitchen. The market clips. The early Valor content from when she'd first arrived, bright and exploratory, finding the town with her camera.
He stopped on a photograph. Just the market square, early morning, empty. The double spot visible in the corner of the frame. Before the trucks were there.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he did something he had never done before in his life.
He opened his own profile and hit the button for a live video. The indicator blinked. Red. Live.
Zero viewers.
He looked at the camera. The market moved behind him, no one paying attention yet, just an ordinary Saturday morning. He thought about Ivy doing this every day — opening herself to the phone, to the audience, to all of it — and he started talking.
"Hi," he said. "Hello. I'm Finn Gallagher."
His eye caught his profile where it said his name and his business.
"Right, you probably know that."
One viewer. Then three.
"I met Ivy —you know, of Sugar & Spite. I met her on the side of the road. She'd run her truck out of oil. Had a fully charged phone, though. She was telling strangers about it on the internet, and I thought—" he stopped. Almost smiled. "I thought I knew exactly what kind of person she was."
Twelve viewers. Twenty.
