Updated Apr 7, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 14: The Weight of Choosing Tomatoes
Ryder
He was in love with her.
He’d known it for longer than he’d been willing to say — known it the way you know something you’re not ready to do anything about yet, the way you recognize the underpainting while you’re still laying color, aware that the fundamental shapes were fixed before you’d consciously committed to them. The knowledge had been sitting in him for weeks, comfortable and alarming in equal measure, like a new tattoo in a place you keep forgetting about until you catch a glimpse and remember oh, that’s permanent now.
She was at a tomato stand.
The Ballard Farmers Market on a Saturday morning in October was exactly what it always was — loud and cold and layered with the smell of wet grass and coffee and expensive cheese and wood smoke from a kettle corn cart — and Emma had arrived with a list, which she had not told him about but he could tell existed from the focused way she moved through the market, not browsing but executing. She had a canvas tote over one arm and a coffee in her other hand and she was looking at a display of heirloom tomatoes with an expression of genuine deliberation, like the decision had stakes, like the wrong tomato was a problem she intended to prevent.
He was holding her second coffee, which she’d handed him before she’d crouched down to examine the bottom row of the display, and he was watching her and he was completely gone on her and there was nothing to be done about it.
She straightened, turned to him. “What do you think, the Brandywines or the Cherokee Purples?”
He looked at the two tomatoes she was holding up. “I genuinely don’t know the difference.”
“The Brandywines are more acidic. Better for sauce. But the Cherokee Purples are more complex, better for eating fresh, and I’m going to do a caprese on Tuesday and I want something with depth.” She looked at both of them again. “But I might also want to do a sauce later in the week.”
“Buy both,” he said.
She looked at him like he’d solved a problem she hadn’t known she was stuck on. “Oh,” she said, with a simplicity that made something in his chest pull sideways. She bought both. She thanked the vendor by name — she’d learned the vendor’s name — and then turned back to Ryder and took her coffee and said, “What do you want from the market?”
“I have everything I need,” he said, which came out more pointed than he’d intended, and she narrowed her eyes at him with a smile she was trying to suppress.
“That was almost too much,” she said.
“Almost,” he agreed.
They walked through the rest of the market and he watched her be herself — bargaining gently with a flower vendor for a bunch of dahlias, stopping to watch a busker play fiddle with the same quality of attention she brought to everything, tasting a honey sample with an expression of comic ecstasy that he filed away in the specific archive he kept of her faces, which was growing extensive. She asked him about his week. He told her about a sleeve consult he’d been excited about — a client who wanted a whole narrative piece, something that told a story rather than just displayed images, which was the kind of commission that made him stay late and like it. She asked questions that were specific and smart. He answered them in more detail than he normally gave because she actually wanted the detail.
Luna had called last night.
Carla had let her use the phone at bedtime — a new thing, her age commanding new technologies with alarming speed — and Luna had said, in the way she said most things, directly and without preamble: “Is Miss Emma coming on Saturday?”
“Not Saturday, baby. But soon.”
A pause. “She could come every Saturday.”
“She has her own things on Saturdays.”
Another pause, during which he’d heard Carla’s voice in the background saying something he couldn’t make out. Then Luna: “Daddy, does Miss Emma sleep over?”
He had not been prepared for this particular line of inquiry. “Why do you ask?”
“Because Theo’s dad’s girlfriend sleeps over all the time and Theo says his dad is happier now. I want you to be happier.”
“I’m already happy,” he’d said.
“More happy,” Luna had clarified, and then Carla had taken the phone and said, with a careful neutrality that he recognized as her version of discretion: “She’s been thinking about this a lot, just so you know.”
He thought about it now, walking beside Emma, watching her calculate the comparative merits of artisan bread loaves with the same rigor she’d applied to the tomatoes. Luna’s logic was simple and clean the way four-year-old logic always was: happiness was good, more happiness was better, the mechanism was obvious, therefore. His own logic was more cluttered — worry about what it meant to Luna to get attached, worry about the pace of things, worry that he was moving too fast or not fast enough, worry that his whole adult life had been a series of careful calculations made in the wake of having had no one calculate anything on his behalf, which left him either over-cautious or reckless depending on the day.
Emma had sent him a photo on Wednesday morning, seven forty-three a.m., caption: it’s real.
The photo was her ribs in morning light — standing in front of what must have been her bathroom mirror, phone angled, the botanical tattoo vivid and complete and fully healed, the roses and ferns and the sparrow absolutely exactly as he’d designed them and better, on her actual skin, in real light, breathing. He’d looked at the photo for a long time. He had not deleted it.
He was also, this week, preparing to tattoo himself.
The sparrow design he’d shown her — she hadn’t asked about it again, had let him hold it in his own time, which was the Emma thing, the way she gave him room while being fully present — was ready. He’d refined it over two weeks, three versions, until the sparrow had the quality of rest he’d wanted, wings folded, perched and still. He was going to ask Jax to do the line work on Wednesday. He was going to tell her after, probably. Maybe. He hadn’t decided yet whether he wanted it to be a gift he gave her or a fact he just let her find, the way the most honest things often arrived — not announced but just suddenly there.
At the end of the market, at a small farm stand with a hand-lettered sign, Emma stopped and looked at a display of dried flower bundles and didn’t pick any of them up, just stood there for a moment with something complicated moving through her face.
“You okay?” he said.
“My mom used to dry flowers,” she said. “She had a whole wall of them in the kitchen. It was the most beautiful thing in that house.” A pause. “She’d probably hate these ones. Too wild. Not orderly enough.”
He didn’t ask about her parents — he knew the shape of it, the strict religiosity, the careful constraints, a childhood spent being correct rather than known — but he stood beside her and let the silence hold whatever she needed it to hold.
“I called her last week,” Emma said. “To tell her I was seeing someone.”
He looked at her. “How did that go?”
“She asked if he was a good Christian man.” A pause. “I said he was a good man. She asked what that meant.”
“What did you say?”
Emma looked at the dried flowers for another moment. Then: “I said he’s kind and he’s honest and he reads Camus and he’s trying to be a good father and that’s more than I know how to fit into a simple category.” She turned to look at him. “She went quiet for a while, and then she said, ‘Is he going to take care of you?’ And I said, I don’t need taking care of. I need someone to be present with.”
He looked at her — at the steadiness of her, the way she’d landed on that phrase like she’d found it the way you find the right word: with relief.
“That’s a good answer,” he said.
“She didn’t think so.” But Emma was almost smiling. “She’ll come around. Or she won’t.” A beat. “I’m starting to be okay with either.”
He took her hand. She leaned into his shoulder for a moment, just briefly, like a rest in a long piece of music — not a stop but a pause within the forward motion.
They walked back to his truck through the market crowd, her canvas tote full of tomatoes and bread and dahlias, his hand around hers, and he thought: I am going to tell her.
Not yet.
But soon.
He was going to be a sparrow on her ribs and she was going to be a sparrow on his wrist and he was going to say the word — the real, irreversible word — and he wasn’t going to be afraid of it, because fear was the thing he’d tattooed on his throat in reverse, that word REMAIN, meaning stay, meaning don’t run from this, meaning you can bear the real things if you let them be real.
Luna was right.
He was going to be more happy.
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