"I rewrote the specials."
"You crossed out everything."
"The specials needed updating."
Boyd looked at him for a moment with the expression he'd been using since they were nineteen, the one that meant I know exactly what you're doing and I'm going to let you do it because watching you do it is genuinely entertaining. Then he looked back at Ivy, who was now crouched down to talk to a small child at her level, laughing at something the kid had said.
"She grew up here?" Boyd said.
"Apparently."
"Huh." Boyd sipped his cocoa. "I think her grandmother had that house on Birch. The one with the porch garden."
Boyd walked the two steps to Ivy's side of the setup and looked at her display. The pictures of the brown butter blondies, the salted caramel bars, and a new addition of small glazed apple hand pies.
"These look good," Boyd said.
"They're full of processed sugar."
"So was every MRE we ate for three years, and you didn't complain then."
"That's exactly my point."
"Miranda's going to want to know about this woman."
"There's nothing to tell Miranda."
"There's forty-seven thousand views of something to tell Miranda."
Finn had met Boyd at nineteen, basic training, two kids from different states who'd both volunteered because they wanted to give back to the country they loved. They'd served three tours between them, came back different in the ways that didn't show up on paperwork, and then — within six months of each other — ended up at the Purple Heart Ranch.
The ranch had been the thing neither of them had known they needed. Six hundred acres outside Valor, working land, the kind of place that asked something physical of you every day and gave you healing back in return. They'd taken care of horses. They'd learned to grow things. They'd learned to be quiet inside the noise of it. They'd slept better than they had in years because their bodies were tired in the right way instead of the wrong way. Finn had arrived there hollowed out and held together by not much, and the land had done what land does; it had given him something to tend that wasn't himself.
The farm had changed everything, or what he'd learned about food had. The ranch ran a nutrition program because whoever had designed the place had understood that bodies coming back from what theirs had been through needed rebuilding from the inside. Finn had sat in those sessions grudgingly at first — he was not, he'd told Boyd, a man who needed to talk about vegetables — and then with increasing attention, because the thing he was hearing matched something he was observing in himself. He was eating differently. He was sleeping. The inflammation in his knee, the one that had ended his service and still woke him at three a.m. on cold nights, was responding to things he'd been told would never change. He'd started reading. Then growing. Then obsessing in the methodical way he did everything, over the relationship between what came out of the ground and what happened to the body that consumed it.
He'd planted his first tomato trial in the ranch's kitchen garden three years ago. The Cherokee Purple had volunteered from a single split fruit, survivor instinct in a plant, and something about that had felt like instruction.
Boyd had found Miranda at the ranch. She'd come in six months after Boyd, a sergeant with a titanium rod in her left leg and the humor of someone who had decided early that the alternative to laughing was worse. Boyd had been a lost cause from approximately the third week. Miranda had taken longer to come around. The ranch had married them in the east field on a Tuesday in October. Finn had stood up with Boyd and thought, without resentment, that some people got to keep the thing they found.
He hadn't.
The ranch had a policy. Married couples could stay. Others transitioned out after six months. It had something to do with zoning.
Finn had moved into town two years ago. He still worked the ranch's farm acreage four days a week because the arrangement suited everyone — the ranch got his labor and expertise, he got use of the land and the greenhouse, and the food truck got its supply chain.
It was a good life. It was a real life. He had built it deliberately, from nothing, and he was not finished building.
The competition was the next piece. Had been the next piece for two years — he'd won it back to back, banked what he could, and this year the numbers finally worked. Prize money plus savings: enough for a lease, a real kitchen, a place with four walls and a sign over the door. Boots & Roots, permanent. Roots in the town that had taken him in when he'd had nothing left and helped him figure out what he was growing toward.
He had not come this far to lose it to a woman in a pink truck.
Across the market, Ivy had finished with the child and was now talking to an older man about something that had her gesturing with both hands, animated, her whole face in it. The man was charmed. They were all charmed. That was the thing about her; she had a brightness that functioned like weather, something you walked into rather than chose.
Boyd reappeared at his elbow. "Miranda's definitely going to want to know about this woman."
"She's a competitor."
Boyd looked at him. Looked at Ivy. Looked back at him with the patience of a man who had known him for fifteen years and was not in any hurry.
