Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The post went up Thursday morning at nine. Ivy watched it move. Ten thousand views in an hour.
From Valor, Actually — Week Six was not the competition content, not the Tomato Couple content, not the market footage, or the fake-dating b-roll.
It was a long one — eleven hundred words, more essay than post — about coming back to a place you left, and what you find when you return.
A love letter to a farmers market in a Midwestern town on a weekday morning when the light comes from the east and the Cherokee Purples are at peak and a man who grows things for a living is teaching you, without meaning to, that attention is its own form of love.
She had not mentioned Finn by name. She hadn't needed to.
The comments were different from the viral clip comments.
Less excited, more — held. People writing longer than people usually wrote in comment sections, about their own hometowns, their own returns, their own farmers’ markets and the things they'd found there that they hadn't expected.
A woman in Ohio who'd moved back to care for her mother and found, to her surprise, that she didn't want to leave again.
A man in Vermont who grew heirloom tomatoes and said she'd described the work from the outside the way he'd never been able to describe it from the inside.
She read all of them. This was not her usual practice.
By noon the post had more engagement than anything she'd published in eighteen months. Not the highest view count — the viral clip still had that by orders of magnitude — but the deepest response, the kind that meant something different. She sat with that for a while.
Devon's email arrived at twelve-forty-seven.
She saw the subject line — In the area — coffee? — and put her phone face-down on the table. Then she sighed, mentally pulled on her big-girl pants, and picked the phone back up. Read the email.
It was warm the way Devon was warm. He was a man who had learned that the right temperature of attention opened doors.
He was in Indianapolis for meetings, he said, and would be passing through the region.
He'd seen the numbers on the Valor content and it was genuinely exciting, and he'd love to catch up if she had an hour, and there was something he'd been wanting to talk to her about in person.
Something he'd been wanting to talk to her about in person? She read that sentence three times. She closed the email.
She texted Eva: Are you free for lunch?
Eva: yes. 12:30. the diner.
The diner had not changed since Ivy was twelve, which was either a failure of imagination or a commitment to integrity.
Same booths, same laminated menus, same pie case by the register with the rotating selection written on a card in the same handwriting it had always been, which meant either generational consistency or the same person had been writing it for forty years and either option felt right.
Eva was already in the back booth. She had coffee and the expression of a woman who was waiting to receive some good gossip. Her face changed when Ivy didn't immediately mention Finn and brought up Devon's name instead.
"When did you last hear from him?" she asked.
"Three weeks ago. I didn't answer."
"And before that?"
"Not since Chicago. Since I left the network."
Eva was quiet for a moment, looking at the phone. Ivy had always valued this about her. Eva didn't say things until they were the things she meant.
"He seems to show up when you're winning."
Ivy looked at her coffee.
"Not to watch you win. To manage the win.
Toward him." Eva turned the phone over, face-down, with a finality that was mildly satisfying.
"The first email was reconnaissance. He was checking whether the numbers were real and whether you were going to sustain them.
They were real, and you sustained them, and now he's in the region with something he wants to talk to you about in person. "
"Yeah."
"You know what the offer is going to be?"
"Some version of what it was in Chicago."
"The question isn't what he's going to offer. The question is whether you're going to let him reframe this as the beginning of something you're doing for his platform, instead of the middle of something you're doing for yourself."
Ivy looked at the pie case. Apple, today. But she couldn't stop thinking about tomatoes. She wondered if she could make a tomato pie. Then laughed at herself when her brain reminded her that it was called a pizza.
"You know I'm here whatever you decide," said Eva.
"I've decided I want a slice of pizza."
They ate their pizza and gossiped. The gossip was all about people on the ranch, people in town. Eva did not bring up Finn
On the walk back to her place, Ivy called Roz.
"Devon emailed again," she said.
"I know, I saw the numbers this morning. I've been waiting for this call. What does he want?"
"He's in the region. Coffee. Something he wants to discuss in person."
"Are you going?"
"I don't know yet."
"Devon is a legible person," Roz said. "He's clear as graphite. There's nothing complicated about him. The complicated part is you, not him. You know what you want. Or rather, what you don't want."
"I've known since before that," Ivy said, without planning to.
"Yeah," Roz said quietly.
"I don't want to work for him. I don't want to work for anybody."
"I'm guessing you like working with someone."
Ivy let out a long sigh.
"Don't answer Devon's email today. Don't answer it tomorrow either. Answer it after Saturday, when you know what you're telling him."
"What will I be telling him after Saturday?"
"I think you'll know," Roz said, and changed the subject to a piece she was editing, and they talked for twenty minutes about someone else's work, which was a relief.
After she hung up, Ivy swiped over to the post. It was still performing.
She could see the numbers climbing in the background tab without opening it, the small favicon updating like a pulse.
Eleven hundred words about coming back to a place you left, and what attention looked like when it wasn't a performance, and a man who grew things and was, without meaning to, teaching her something she hadn't known she needed to learn.
She swiped out of the post and over to the Photos icon on her phone. Ivy pulled up the video. It started mid-motion—her laugh, the clatter of the spoon, the flick of sauce—and then the moment.
His hand. Her cheek. The pause that hadn’t felt like a pause at the time. And then—
His thumb.
Her breath caught again, as if her body remembered before her mind caught up. The slow, deliberate way he brought it to his mouth. The way his lips closed around his finger.
It would do well. She knew it would. People loved this kind of thing—unscripted, unpolished, and hot. So hot.
She could already hear the comments. They'd call him Tomato Daddy. Taddy?
Instead, she tapped the menu. Saved it. In a private folder.
Her thumb lingered there, just for a second. Then she closed her phone.