"I was wrong about that." He looked at the Sugar and Spite truck beside him. "I was wrong about a lot of things. She's the most real person I've met in longer than I can tell you. She added sweetness to my life. Not the artificial kind. Not the kind that gives you a headache. The kind that…" he looked for the words, "…the kind that takes time to develop. That you can't rush. That tastes like what it actually is."
He looked at the camera.
"And I want her to know that I would grow tomatoes in a window box in the middle of a city if that's where she needed to be. I'd grow them in a smoggy apartment with bad light and no soil, and I would figure it out because I feel fallow when she's not around. Like I stopped growing."
The comments were moving fast. He caught fragments — THIS MAN and TOMATO COUPLE and FINN in all capitalsappearing over and over — and then something else, the same words appearing from multiple people in quick succession, cutting through the noise.
Turn around.
Finn turn around!
SHE'S RIGHT THERE!!!!
He turned around.
Ivy Lopez was standing behind him in the market square.
She was wearing her typical pastel colored t-shirt and jeans. Her eyes were bright in the way that meant she'd been crying or was about to, and she was looking at him with an expression he didn't have words for yet but intended to learn.
He put the phone down and stuffed it back in his pocket.
He was vaguely aware that Dot had appeared from somewhere with her phone up. He walked to Ivy, and she met him halfway, and that was the end of the distance between them.
"I thought you'd left for the show," he said.
"I'm not doing the show."
"You should do the show. I don't have to be on it?—"
"I don't want you on the show because I was trying to protect you. From the show. From the network and the producers and the comments, and all of it. It can—" she stopped. "It can take something real and make it into something else, and I didn't want that for you. I don't want that for you. You're—" she pressed her lips together for a moment, "— you're exactly right the way you are, Finn, and I didn't want the internet to get its hands on that and start having opinions and meetings and test groups about it."
"I would've done it for you," he said. "The show. If that's what you wanted."
"That's why I said no. I said no to Devon this morning. To the whole thing. I don't want a show that the network is in charge of. I want to stay here. I want to be your actual partner — nota television one — and I want to keep making content for the people who've been showing up because they like who I actually am. I want to be real. With you. Here."
"You picked Valor?" he said.
"I picked you," she said. "Valor came with you."
Finn was aware that they were in the middle of the Saturday market, that Dot was circling at a respectful but committed distance with her phone, that the comment section of his abandoned live video was probably doing something extraordinary, that approximately half of Valor was either watching or would hear about this before noon. He was aware of all of it and did not care about any of it for a single moment.
Finn kissed Ivy. She kissed him back with her whole self — no performance, no audience, no camera — just Ivy, warm and certain and here, her free hand at his jaw. He pulled back just enough to see her face.
"You taste like tomatoes," she said.
"It's to-MAH-to," he said.
She laughed — sudden and complete — and reached for him again.
Dot's footagewent live at eleven forty-seven that morning. By two o'clock it had four million views. The comments section, every single person in it, said some version of the same thing:we knew it would end like this.
EPILOGUE
They didn't win.
The State Cook-Off went to a couple from the capital with a Korean-Mexican fusion taco that the judges called boundary-pushing and zeitgeist-defining. Ivy stood beside Finn in the audience and watched them accept the trophy and felt… nothing she would have expected to feel.
Not the old, hollow thing. Not the sting of second place that she'd carried with her from two network competitions and worn like a coat she couldn't take off. Not the quiet, corrosive voice that said almost, again, always almost.
