Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Finn was in the rows by five-thirty. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that he'd been awake since three, lying in the dark, pretending he was thinking of nothing, until he had given up and come out here because the rows were the only place he knew how to think.
He walked them in a daze. The Cherokee Purples were coming in heavy on the south end. He noted it without writing it down, which was not how he operated, which told him something about the state of his operating.
He'd been prepared. That was the thing he kept returning to, the thing that sat in the center of his chest like a stone he kept picking up and examining, and putting back down. He had stood on that sidewalk in the morning light and looked at Devon Park's lips moving, and he had decided.
Long distance was workable. Hundreds of miles was a number, and numbers were manageable. He would watch her on television and drive up on weekends and root for her from whatever distance the thing required, because that was what you did when something was worth it. Ivy Lopez was worth it.
He'd been prepared for her to go. He had not been prepared for her to say no.
Not to the long distance. Not to work something out. No to all of it; to Devon, to the show, to Finn, to the sidewalk, to the morning. She'd said I need to think in a voice he'd never heard from her before and closed the door. It had shut, and that had been that.
He picked up a Cherokee Purple from the vine. Set it back down.
Had it been real? Had the two of them been real? Or had it been the fake relationship Mrs. Patel and the committee had cooked up?
The thought arrived sideways, in the dark, when his defenses were occupied elsewhere.
He didn't want to think it. He thought it anyway, because he was a man who respected evidence, and the evidence was: she had walked away from a television show and from him in the same motion.
Which suggested that neither was what she wanted.
Which suggested that what she'd had here in Valor had been—
He put the thought down. He walked the rows instead.
The fields caught the light first, the long rows going gold from east to west, and Finn walked them with his hands in his pockets and his boots finding the familiar ground without needing to be told where to go.
Around him, the ranch came to life. Boots on gravel paths, screen doors opening and closing, someone calling across the yard in the easy shorthand of people who had been through things together and come out the other side still standing.
Men and women who had arrived here broken in ways that didn't always show on the outside, and who had found, in the combination of land and labor and community that the Purple Heart Ranch offered, something that worked. Something that held.
He watched a pair of them moving along the fence line on the eastern pasture — one teaching, one learning, the way it went here — and felt the familiar, complicated thing he always felt watching the ranch work.
Gratitude. Something adjacent to grief. The recognition of a man who had needed exactly this and had been given it and knew what it had cost to build.
Some of them were even falling in love.
He thought about that as he turned at the end of the row.
The zoning rule was practical in origin.
The ranch had fought for agricultural residential status years ago, which meant the land could only be occupied by families.
Single residents qualified under a dependent clause that the original lawyers had been creative about.
The practical effect was that people who stayed here long-term tended to build lives here. Tended to build them with someone.
Finn didn't live on the ranch. He worked here. He stood at the end of the row and looked at the ranch coming fully awake around him and thought, for the first time with any seriousness: if he moved here, would she become his bride?
He didn't know. That was the honest answer.
He didn't know what Ivy Lopez wanted — not from the show, not from Devon, not from Valor, and not, it turned out, from him, because she had walked through a door and closed it and he was standing in a field at six in the morning trying to read evidence that wasn't there.
He walked toward the mess hall when the hour became decent. Standing alone in the field with his thoughts had stopped being productive, and the mess hall meant coffee and Boyd, and Boyd, for all his opinions, was better company than the inside of Finn's own head right now.
Finn came around the east path and saw the truck.
His heart did something immediate and embarrassing before his brain caught up.
The Sugar and Spite truck was parked alongside the mess hall in the early morning light, pink as ever, and for one full second Finn Hargrove forgot everything that had happened in the last twelve hours and felt nothing but the leap of she's here.
Then he saw Boyd and Fran leaning against the back of it.
Just Boyd and Fran. No Ivy. Boyd with his coffee and Fran with his arms crossed.
He'd forgotten. In everything that had happened since yesterday morning that the guys had said they'd fix her truck. He stood there for a moment and let the leap in his chest settle back down to where it belonged.
That was the thing about the Purple Heart Ranch.
The men and women here were true to their word.
Always had been, in his experience — something about having been in places where reliability was the difference between coming home and not coming home made people here take promises seriously, even small ones, even the kind that just involved a pink food truck with an oil problem.
They hadn't just fixed it. He could see that from here.
The bodywork was touched up where it had been scraped; the logo repainted in fresh cursive, the whole thing washed and dried and sitting in the morning light looking better than it had since probably the day Ivy had driven it off whatever lot she'd bought it from.
Fran held out the keys.
"Benny finished last night," he said. "Full engine check, new oil system, touched up the paint."
Finn took the keys.
"What's up?" Boyd asked. "You don't look like a man ready to win a food competition, get his dream restaurant, and the dream girl."
"She was offered a television show."
"Oh," sighed Boyd.
Fran frowned. "Isn't that a good thing? Eva said Ivy wanted her own show."
"It wouldn't be her own show," said Finn. "It would be our show."
"And she didn't want that?" asked Boyd.
"Oh," sighed Fran. "Maybe she wants to keep it separate: her personal life and her professional life.
Maybe doing a show together felt like it would change what you are to each other.
Turn it into something with a contract and a production budget and twelve episodes and an option for a second season.
Some people don't want their relationship to be content. "
Boyd leaned forward. "Has she posted about the two of you? Since the viral clip?"
Finn thought about it. The greenhouse video with Finn visible at the edge of the frame, watching her sign off, the comment section erupting. But nothing since. Not the Ferris wheel. Not the cotton candy. Not the morning in the truck.
Not one frame of any of it.
"No," he said.
Boyd sat back. Said nothing. His expression said enough.
Finn looked at the keys on the table.
He picked them up. Got in the truck and rolled down the window. The sugary smell of it made his fat cells happy and his muscles constrict. He started it up and headed to her.
He thought about every time Ivy had reached for her phone and then put it away.
Every time she'd framed a shot and then not taken it.
The four photographs in the greenhouse that she'd mentioned, once, that she'd never posted.
The way she'd shown up to their date with a purse too small to fit a phone and said the important people know I'm with you.
He pulled up outside her apartment at half-past eight and sat for a moment.
Then he got out, went to the door, and knocked.
Nothing.
He knocked again. Waited. Looked up at the windows.
No movement, no shadow, no light behind the curtains that would have suggested someone was in there, choosing not to answer.
He stepped back and looked at the building and felt the deflation of a man who had been carrying something and arrived at the destination only to find it empty.
The truck sat at the curb behind him, pink and repaired and waiting, the keys in his hand.
He looked at them.
He pulled out his phone. No answer.
His only thought was that she was already gone.