Now came the part Localad hadn't fully let himself think about. 

The film studios wanted him in Los Angeles. Not permanently. Desmond was very careful to say that, more than once, and in a tone that Localad would only later recognize as a hedge. But he was to be needed for the immediate future, for the sake of publicity and production meetings, for what Desmond called "getting the creator embedded in the process." A phrase suggesting Localad was either a journalist trapped in a war zone or an unusually literary raisin in a Hollywood fruit loaf. All because a movie based on someone's unpublished manuscript benefited, apparently, from that someone being physically present to answer any questions, the way he clearly wasn't going to be able to answer them from two thousand miles up a rural coastline with an extremely unreliable cell service.

Marjory helped him to pack, the week before he left, while sitting on the edge of his childhood bed, the same one he'd slept in above the shop for his entire adult life. Localad only owned four good shirts, two of which strongly disagreed with the definition. Marjory folded them all with increasing hostility.

“You could stay here,” she insisted.

“Desmond says it’s better if I’m there.”

“Desmond is producing the film. He would say it was better if you were fired from a cannon through the studio gates, provided it tested well.”

Localad sat down next to her on the bed. “It isn’t going to be forever.”

Marjory folded the same shirt again.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” He didn't, and they both knew he didn't, and neither of them said anything else about it, because there truly wasn't anything else to actually say. The room quickly became full of everything. Everything they were not saying.

Localad was leaving the town for the first time without a scheduled return. Marjory was not merely afraid he would change through this. She was more so afraid he would discover that Meridian Cove, Harbour Page and perhaps Marjory herself belonged to a much smaller life than the one now opening up before him.

He hired Mr. Okafor's granddaughter, a college student named Priya; an unrelated Priya to Priya the lawyer, a coincidence Localad found funnier than anyone else did; to run the shop part-time over the summer, with strictly explicit instructions that amounted mostly to “don't let it close down” and “call me if anything catches fire, literally or otherwise”.

The morning he left, Meridian Cove gathered to see him off while pretending it had errands to perform. The whole town seemed to know somehow, the way small towns always know things before anyone's officially told them. Mrs. Alvarez pressed a paper bag of sandwiches into his hands at the diner. Mr. Okafor shook his hand twice, which for Mr. Okafor amounted to an embrace. The second handshake contained everything the first had been far too dignified to express.

Harbour Page stood behind them all, along with its missing punctuation and cracked bell. Localad placed his palm against the door. The shop did not ask him to stay. This was quite generous of it.

Marjory drove him to the airport two hours inland, and at the gate she hugged him hard and hijacked, for one moment, whatever brave, composed thing he'd meant to say, so that all he actually managed was, "I'll call you," which was true and also nowhere near enough. Localad, being competent at almost everything except emotional declaration, checked the zip on his suitcase.

“That is the official slogan of people at airports.”

At the departure gate, she hugged him again. Only harder.

“Three things,” she said into his shoulder.

“What?”

“Desmond said you need to know and maintain the three things you won’t ever compromise on.”

“I don’t know them yet.”

“You know one.”

“Jasmine keeps the sword?”

“Good. Now go find the other two, before someone finds them for you.”

On the plane, he pulled out his phone and reread the last email from Desmond, sent the night before, full of exclamation points about table reads, casting lists and a director whose festival wins Localad still hadn't found time to research properly.

THIS IS GOING TO BE BIG, Desmond had written. BIGGER THAN EITHER OF US EXPECTS! So get yourself some sleep on the flight. You're going to need it.

Localad looked out the window as the plane lifted off the runway and the familiar coastline fell away beneath him; the harbour, the boats, the shop with its cracked bell and missing apostrophe, all of it shrinking to something the size of a thumbnail and then to nothing at all. The town fast became just a rumour. Harbour Page vanished last, although that may have just been his imagination.

Localad was sixty-four years old and flying toward Los Angeles because a total stranger with a dead car battery had believed, more than Localad himself sometimes had, that the story he'd spent twenty years building in the back room of a failing bookstore, was good enough to change his life. He had no idea yet how completely it would... The story that had refused to remain hidden.

He felt grand, terrified and faintly airsick all at once and sensed, for the first time in his adult life, entirely un-moored from everything he understood about who he was. In his imagination, he will soon be entering LA like a conquering author beneath massive banners exclaiming his name.

But back in reality, his suitcase somehow arrived at Phoenix.