Chapter Thirty:  Standing Tall

The industry reported Localad’s refusal as though he had recently declined the presence of gravity.

SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHOR REJECTS MILLIONS!

PURRADISE CREATOR WALKS AWAY FROM FRANCHISE!

AUTHOR TURNS DOWN STUDIO SEQUEL DEAL, CITES ARTISTIC INDEPENDENCE!

ONE MAN SAYS NO TO HOLLYWOOD!

This final headline was totally inaccurate. Many people had said no to Hollywood. Most of them simply did not receive a full-on press release immediately afterward.

Customers arrived at the store to congratulate him on his immense courage. Some even asked whether he had lost his mind. Several actually managed both in the same sentence.

Mrs. Alvarez placed the article beside the till and then charged tourists fifty cents each to hear “the real story,” which somehow contained three invented helicopters and a fistfight in the studio lobby.

“There was no fistfight,” Localad said.

“Not with that attitude.”

"And helicopters?"

Localad found, reading the coverage from behind his own counter weeks later, that he felt almost nothing about it at all, no vindication, no regret, simply the quiet, settled satisfaction of a decision he had already made peace with, before anyone else had a chance to weigh in on it.

Marjory asked him about it only once, directly, on a walk along the harbour one evening in early autumn, the same walk Localad used to take alone after closing the shop, back before any of this had happened, back when Purradise was still a secret he kept from the whole town except for the woman walking beside him right now.

"Do you ever think about the money?" she asked. "Not to second-guess you. I'm just curious whether it's a clean no, or whether some part of you still turns it over."

He considered the question honestly, the way he tried to consider most things she asked him, because she had a talent for asking the version of a question that actually needed answering rather than the version that was easy to answer politely.

"I think about it sometimes," he admitted. "Not the way you'd expect, though. I don't think about what I'd do with the money. I think about the version of me who took the first deal, eighteen months ago, sitting on that box of paperbacks in the back room, and how certain he was that the money was the whole point, the only point, the thing that would finally prove the book, and by extension, himself to be worth something. I feel for that version of me. I don't think he was wrong to say yes. I just think he didn't yet know what saying yes was going to cost."

"And now?"

"Now I know the cost," he said. "And knowing it, this offer wasn't actually that hard to say no to. I already have the thing the money was supposed to buy me. I have proof the story matters. It's sitting on my own shelves, in my own words, selling to people who found it themselves because they wanted to, not because a trailer told them to. That's worth more to me than another six figures in the bank and another eighteen months of somebody else deciding how loud my ending gets to be. Now the book matters without needing me to sell it again.” 

“That isn’t what I asked.”

He smiled. Marjory did not allow emotional answers to disguise themselves as literary criticism.

“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes I imagine the roof being fully repaired, the accounts being full, never worrying again. Then I remember the eighteen months of meetings explaining why a quiet scene should remain quiet. That’s when the money stops looking free.”

They walked in silence for a while after that, past the same boats knocking against the same pilings, past the diner with its flickering neon signage, and Marjory slipped her hand into his without either of them making any particular announcement of the gesture, the way two people do when a thing has been true for a while before either of them found the moment to say so out loud.

“I don’t regret the first deal,” Localad said. “It saved the shop. It also taught me the cost. I needed both truths.”

"For what it's worth," she said eventually, "I think Purradise is all the better for it. The whole world you built. I think it needed you to be the kind of person who could say no to that offer, or it wouldn't have deserved the ending you gave it in the first place."

“That sounds suspiciously profound.”

“Don’t spread it around.”

"It's a very generous way of saying I'm stubborn."

"You are stubborn," she agreed. "It's one of my favourite things about you. It's also, apparently, the thing that saved your book."

He laughed at that, the easy, unguarded laugh that had become more frequent in the months since he'd come home, and they walked the rest of the way back to the book store together, in the particular, comfortable quiet of two people who no longer needed to fill every silence with something, because the silence itself, at last, felt like more than enough.

They stopped outside Harbour & Page.

The store's newly restored sign moved gently above them. Inside, the shelves waited in the dark, holding thousands of endings that had all refused sequels for a lot less.

Localad turned to Marjory.

“I love you,” he said.

The three  little words arrived flawlessly without any prior rehearsal and therefore survived the situation.

Marjory looked at him for a long moment.

“I know,” she said.

“That seems unfairly brief.”

“I’ve known since 1998. I’m exhausted.”

Then she kissed him.

The cracked bell, stirred by the door behind them, gave one small broken note.

It had none of the grand, polished, and emotional qualities of a professional movie sceen.

No harbour fireworks began. Nobody applauded except for Mrs. Alvarez, who had been locking the diner and considered privacy an urban myth.

It was better than cinematic.

It was truth.

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