She'd felt Finn's hand find hers in the dark of the audience, and she'd looked at him — at his profile in the stage light, steady and unconcerned, already thinking about something else, already ahead of it — and she'd thought:I am not alone in this. For the first time in her career, in any room where results were being announced, she was not alone in it.
Second place had never felt so much like winning.
Now they were standing side by side again. The keys were heavier than she'd expected. She didn't know why she'd expected keys to be light — she supposed she'd been thinking of them as symbolic, and symbolic things always felt weightless inimagination. But these were real keys, old-fashioned, on a ring with a small wooden tag that said Boots & Roots in the same letters that were now mounted above the door of the building in front of them. When the property manager pressed them into Finn's palm, they made a solid, specific sound.
Finn looked at the keys for a long moment. After many arguments, he'd accepted Ivy's financial contribution to the restaurant. It had come with an ultimatum: either he take the money as a symbol that he knew she was in this for the long haul, or if he refused her one more time, it meant he didn't take her or their relationship's longevity seriously.
Ivy had meant it. She would've invested her whole life savings in Finn, in his dream, in anything he asked. That's how much she believed in him. That's how much she loved him.
He was going to be a success, and she was going to stand by him every step of the way.
So she stood next to him as his dream was being realized. She did not take his hand. She let him have the moment.
He looked up at the building. At the sign. At the door that was now his door, to the kitchen that was now his kitchen, in the town that had saved his life and was now going to have his name on a permanent structure within it.
"Well," he said.
"Well," she agreed.
He'd offered to add her name to the sign. Sugar and Spite & Boots and Roots. She'd declined. Not because the name was awful —because it was. But because this was his dream, and she wanted him to have it exactly as he'd dreamed it.
Ivy had what she wanted. She had an audience she didn't have to perform for. She had a camera she could turn on and just — be herself, every single time, and they showed up. And she got to kiss a man who was very slowly, very grudgingly, letting her add more sugar into his life.
Inside, Boots & Roots smelled like old wood and new possibility and very faintly of the lemon cleaner someone had used on the prep surfaces. The kitchen was exactly as he'd drawn it — she'd seen the plans so many times she could have walked it blindfolded — and she moved through it beside him while he checked things with the focused attention of a man taking inventory of something he'd been waiting a long time to count.
She drifted toward the walk-in refrigerator because it was there and because she was curious and because she'd learned that Finn communicated in spaces the way other people communicated in words — the greenhouse, the rows, the mess hall — and she wanted to see what he'd done with this one.
She pulled it open.
It was mostly empty. First day, nothing stocked yet, just the clean, cold smell of a refrigerator waiting to become itself. But on the center shelf, in the deliberate way of a man who had thought about placement, sat a small collection of Cherokee Purples — six of them, arranged with the care he gave to everything — and in the middle of them, nestled between the tomatoes like it had been planted there, a ring box.
Ivy stood in the cold light of the refrigerator and looked at the ring box for a long moment.
She picked it up. Turned around.
Finn was on one knee.
He had the expression of a man who had prepared something to say — she could see it, the words waiting — and she looked at him on the floor of his restaurant, in front of his kitchen, with his hand slightly outstretched and his jaw doing one thing and his eyes doing the other thing, and she thought about the side of a county road and a pink truck out of oil and a man who hadn't smiled at her and a chalkboard that had started a war and a Cherokee Purple eaten over a planting trough and a Ferris wheel and cotton candy he'd claimed to hate and a live video with zeroviewers that had ended with four million people saying we knew —
"Yes," she said.
He blinked. "You didn't let me?—"
"Yes," she said again. "Finn. Yes."
He opened the box. The ring caught the kitchen light — simple and exactly right, nothing that had ever been near a focus group in its life — and he took her hand and put it on her finger and stood up and she was already reaching for him before he'd finished standing.
He held her in the middle of the empty restaurant for a long time. Outside, the town square was doing its ordinary Saturday evening things, entirely unaware that something permanent had just been decided in here. The Cherokee Purples sat on the refrigerator shelf, and the sign said Boots & Roots above the door, and somewhere across the square the Sugar and Spite truck was parked in its usual spot, and Ivy Lopez stood in the arms of the grumpiest, most deliberate, most specific man she'd ever met and felt — rooted.
Like something that was going to grow for a long time.
She turned her face up to his.
"To-MAY-to," she said.
He smiled. The real one. All the way.
"To-MAH-to," he said back, and kissed her.
