Ivy looked at Finn, who was explaining the Brandywine's lower-acid profile to a customer with the warmth of a man giving a deposition.
"He's spoken three full sentences to me," Ivy said. "One of them was about sugar content."
"That's basically a sonnet for Finn." Dot accepted a sample kettle corn from Clarence without looking at him, the ease of a decades-long partnership. "You'll see."
At two o'clock, Ivy posted the clip. It was three minutes of the morning distilled: the nutritional cards, the sign escalations, the crossed-out chalkboard, and at the end, a three-second shot she'd grabbed without fully planning to. She'd been reaching for her phone to check her metrics when she'd seen him with the tomato.
He was checking ripeness; the Cherokee Purple cradled in his palm, his thumb moving across the skin with a gentleness that was completely at odds with the rest of him. His hands were a farmer's hands, broad and certain. The care in them when he touched the fruit was the most unguarded thing about him. She'd noticed the hands first. Then the forearms. Then, because she was only human, and the man was built like someone who had been doing physical work, his entire life and had the biceps to prove it, the rest of him; the strong line of his thigh as he shifted his weight, the set of his shoulders, the five o'clock shadow in the early afternoon.
And then he'd smiled. Just for the tomato. A small, private thing that had nothing to do with the market or the crowd or the ongoing sign dispute or her. The afternoon light had come in from the west at exactly the wrong moment and hit his cheekbone at an angle that should have required a permit. Ivy had taken the shot before she'd made a conscious decision to do so.
She had looked at it afterward for slightly longer than was strictly necessary for editorial purposes. She added no caption. She didn't need one.
By four o'clock it had forty thousand views. By five, the top comment said:this is foreplay.
She put her phone in her pocket. She started loading her cart.
"Good market," she said conversationally.
Finn lifted a crate. "Mm."
"I sold out of the brown butter cupcakes. I'm going to make twice as many for next week."
"Congratulations."
Ivy picked up the carrier and put it on her cart. She looked out at the square, where the market was winding down in the long amber light, the crowd thinning to the last few unhurried browsers, Dot and Clarence folding their chairs with the ease of a ritual performed a thousand times.
She felt, unexpectedly and somewhat inconveniently, like she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
"Same time next week?" she said.
He gave a sound from somewhere in his chest that was not quite a word. She did not think about the top comment as she wheeled her cart away. She thought about it the entire drive home.
CHAPTER FOUR
Boyd arrived shortly after Finn had packed the last crate, which meant he'd driven from the ranch at his usual speed and stopped for hot cocoa along the way because Boyd's relationship with punctuality was more philosophical than practical. Boyd's walk was unhurried and slightly too loud for the space, the way he moved through a crowd as if he expected it to part and was pleased when it did. Then he appeared at the edge of the north lane with two cups in hand and watched as Ivy walked away from her pink truck.
Finn watched him clock her. Watched the thing that happened to Boyd's face when he found something he intended to enjoy.
"No," Finn said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're about to."
Boyd handed him a cup and looked at Ivy, who was chatting with Dot and Clarence with the ease of someone who collected people without trying. Boyd watched this for a full ten seconds.
"So," Boyd said. "You're making friends."
"She's a neighbor."
"She's a neighbor who had a chalkboard war with you."
"How do you know? You weren't here."
Boyd showed him his phone. Forty-seven thousand views and a comment section that Finn read approximately four lines of before handing the phone back with the deliberate calm of a man who was not going to react to this in a public setting.
"The crossed-out sign," Boyd said, with audible delight. "People are reading into that."
