Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The coffee shop was new, but the building wasn't. It had been a pharmacy for as long as Ivy could remember, the old kind with a soda counter along one wall that was still there, repurposed now into a coffee bar with the original stools and a new espresso machine that looked faintly apologetic about the renovation.
Someone had left the pressed tin ceiling intact. Ivy approved of this decision.
Eva was already there when she arrived. She stood as soon as Ivy came through the door, arms opening wide in a welcome that felt as warm as it looked.
Ivy took her in—the familiar golden-brown glow of her skin, her jet-black hair pulled back in a way that showed off the softness of her face, the fullness of her figure.
Eva had always been curvy, but now there was something richer to it, a settled ease in her body that spoke of being loved well, of a life that fit her.
Marriage had agreed with her in all the best ways.
"Sit," Eva said. "I already ordered you something. I guessed oat milk. Was that right?"
"That was right."
She settled back into her chair with the ease of a woman comfortable in her own life. She looked good. Better than Ivy remembered. More settled. More herself. "So. You're back."
"I'm back."
"In the town you spent approximately every waking hour trying to leave."
"I prefer exploring options."
"You told me at graduation that you'd come back when you were someone." Eva's smile had no edge to it. "So, who are you?"
Ivy wrapped her hands around the mug that appeared in front of her. "I think I was confusing somewhere and someone. I'm still working on it. That's what the summer's for."
Eva looked at her for a moment, as though she was deciding how much to say and then deciding to say more of it. "You look tired. Not bad tired. Just — like you've been going fast for a long time."
"Chicago is fast."
"I know. Fran and I drove up twice when he had his follow-up appointments at Northwestern, and both times I came home feeling like I'd been wrung out."
Ivy had known the broad shape of Eva's husband's heart condition.
Fran DeMonti had come back from an overseas tour with shrapnel in his heart.
He hadn't even wanted to try to love Eva for fear that it might literally break his heart every time it skipped a beat for her.
Eva's texts during the worst of it had been brief and factual in the way of someone conserving energy for the thing itself, and Ivy had sent back what felt like inadequate responses from hotel rooms in cities she was passing through.
"How is he now?"
"Good. Really good. He has hard days still, but the ranch — it helped.
The whole community of it. They've built something for which I still don't have language.
You drive through the gate and something in your shoulders just…
" She made a small, releasing gesture. "Fran says it's because everyone there already knows the hardest thing about themselves and each other, and they all came through it. "
Ivy thought about that. "That sounds like a real found family."
"It is." Eva turned her mug on its saucer. "Your neighbor does a lot out there."
"Neighbor?" Ivy didn't think the place next door to her was leased.
"The food program — the truck, the cooking workshops. Finn was at the ranch a couple of years ago. Now I can't make a salsa with a store-bought tomato. It has to be one of his."
Ivy looked up. "Finn? He was a soldier?"
"Mm. Fran says he doesn't talk about the service much. Prefers to talk to the vegetables."
The coffee was good. The tin ceiling caught the morning light and scattered it around the room. Outside the window, Main Street was doing its small-town thing: the hardware store owner sweeping his porch, a woman walking a dog that was tugging at the leash to hurry it up.
"It's different here now," Eva said.
"I grew up here."
"It's not the same place, and I think you know it. We didn't have a lot of support as kids. Carlos and Rosie are thriving on the ranch and in school. Carlos made the soccer team."
Ivy was glad to hear that her cousins had adjusted.
She knew Eva had had a hard time raising her younger siblings in the rougher part of town.
When Ivy had driven through their old neighborhood, it had looked different.
The streets were clean. There was a mural on the brick walls instead of dripping graffiti.
She looked out the window. A different mural was visible on the feed store from this angle: the wheat field, the sunflowers, the market scene with its warm ochres.
"Do you think you'll stay?" Eva asked.
"Ask me in October."
Eva smiled as if she already knew the answer and was willing to wait for Ivy to catch up.
Ivy walked back to her complex the long way, through the residential blocks instead of the square because she wanted to look at things slowly. The town had the quality of something that had been running without her and had not suffered for it, which she found both reassuring and faintly humbling.
She made herself a hot cocoa once she got back to the apartment.
Her parents had retired to the migration of the Midwesterner.
She fired off an email to them, knowing they wouldn't be up for a phone call as they'd likely be out with their new group of friends.
Then she pulled open a search app. She told herself she was checking her market analytics.
She typed "Finn Hargrove Purple Heart Ranch" into the search bar.
What came back was not much. A ranch website with a minimal design and a mailing address and no photographs of any individual. A co-op membership listing. A single entry in an agricultural grant database from two years ago. And one article.
Roots and Recovery: How a Midwestern Ranch Is Redefining What Comes Next — byline Sloane Mercer, published in a mid-sized regional food and culture magazine a little over two years ago. The kind of outlet that got passed around by people who cared about regional journalism, respected in its lane.
It was good writing. Careful and warm without being sentimental.
The ranch got two-thirds of the piece — the program, the land, the way the work was structured.
Finn appeared in the second half, not as a subject exactly but as a presence: a farmer who had started bringing produce to the program before the program had a name, who talked about his heirloom varieties with the specificity of someone who might be a little obsessed or obsessive.
There was a quote about Cherokee Purples — there's a difference between a tomato grown for transport and one grown for taste, and most people have only ever eaten the first kind. That sounded exactly like him.
Ivy wrinkled her brow at the thought. She'd known the man for two days. She didn't know exactly what he sounded like.
Ivy read the article again. Then she looked at the date. Then she looked at everything that came after it — for the ranch, for Finn — which was publicly: nothing. No follow-up piece. No second profile. She closed the tab.
A ping sounded, alerting Ivy to an email. It was from Devon.
The subject line read Checking in. Ivy minimized the window and took a shower. When she came back out in her comfy PJs, the browser window opened the moment she woke up her computer.
It was a good email, which was the problem with Devon.
He was excellent at emails. He was professional, but with the familiarity of someone who had known her at a particular stage of her career.
The email asked how the summer project was going, noted that the From Valor, Actually content was picking up traction in a way that was, his word, exciting, and mentioned that there were some conversations happening that she might want to be part of.
She closed the email without replying and called Roz.
Roz picked up on the second ring, which meant she was at her desk, which meant it was a slow editing day.
"Devon emailed," Ivy said.
"He watched the clip." Roz's voice had the flat clarity it got when she was diagnosing something. "The sign war one. It got forty-seven thousand views, Ivy. He watches your numbers."
"I know."
"What did you say back?"
"Nothing yet."
"Good." A pause, the sound of Roz moving something on her desk. "How are you, actually? Not the content. You."
"Good. I had coffee with my cousin; Eva. She married a veteran, and they live on a working ranch nearby. She looked really happy."
"How do you look, babe?"
Ivy looked out the window. She could just make out Main Street from here. "Probably tired."
"Okay, enough chit-chat. Tell me about the farmer."
Ivy had been waiting for this. "There's nothing to tell."
"Forty-seven thousand people would disagree."
"That's a content dynamic. We share a… we're parking neighbors. We have a running disagreement about signage and sugar content. That's the whole thing."
"You filmed his hands for twenty seconds."
"It was good light."
"Ivy."
"He's very — " she stopped. Started again. "He's ex-military. He grows heirloom tomatoes. And he doesn't like sugar."
"Sounds like a serial killer," Roz said.
"Exactly! He's suspicious of cameras and annoyed by my speaker, and he hasn't voluntarily said more than eight words to me."
"With penmanship —and biceps— like that, he doesn't need words."
"Yeah."
"The content is good. Not because of the views. Because on film you look and sound like yourself again. The food vlogger before the reality show competitions."
"Yeah." That was all she had to say. Ivy had used all of her other words during the content she'd filmed earlier.
But somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered what Finn might write on his chalkboard next weekend, and what she would write in response.