Chapter Twenty-Seven:  The Studio Panics

Priya called Localad before opening.

“The studio would like to purchase the full publishing rights to Purradise.”

“But they already have a publishing partner. So why the actual studio?”

“They would like to own the underlying rights outright.”

“To publish it with their own ending?”

Priya allowed a silence to perform an autopsy.

“The terms would permit them to determine the book’s whole future.”

“So they want to make it disappear.”

“I cannot establish their intent. I can however, establish that the contract would give them a remarkably efficient disappearance button to do so.”

Then she named the sum.

It was an exceptionally generous offer, large enough that Priya had to read the number to Localad twice over the phone, the second time much slower, to make sure he'd heard it correctly.

Localad sat down.

The amount was large enough to solve every financial problem he had ever possessed and several he had not yet invented. He could renovate Harbour & Page, buy the building next door, replace the roof, repair the heating and employ enough staff to take occasional afternoons off in which nothing required fixing.

For one treacherous minute, the number almost became a future.

"They want to buy the book," Localad repeated, sitting at his own counter, looking out at the shop's front window where a small, hand-lettered sign still advertised the seventh printing now underway. "Not to publish it better. Just to… what, control it?"

"That's my read on it too," Priya said. "The offer includes clauses that would let the acquiring company determine print runs, availability, even whether it stays in print at all going forward. I want to be careful about how I say this, because I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth that I can't prove. But if I were advising a studio client who wanted an inconvenient bestseller to simply become quieter and less available without technically banning it, this is roughly the kind of offer I'd draft."

Localad thought about the number for exactly as long as it took to remember why none of it mattered. It wasn't because the money wasn't real, and not because the temptation wasn't real either, standing as he was in a shop that had spent three whole generations being just one bad season away from permanently closing down, holding, suddenly, the theoretical possibility of never worrying about money ever again for the rest of his life.

Then Mrs. Alvarez entered the shop and abruptly announced that the diner's cinnamon rolls were “turning morally uncertain” and should be eaten right away.

Mr. Okafor arrived for his paper.

Marjory crossed the square carrying fresh dahlias.

The shop filled with ordinary life.

Localad looked at the shelves full of Purradise: plain cover, his ending, his name attached to the words he had actually chosen.

The very first book sale had saved the shop and almost cost him the story. This new sale would only save him from any administrative worry by giving someone else the right to silence the thing that had survived.

He thought of Jasmine.

She had not kept hold of the sword because possession was virtuous. She had kept it because carrying it had become her own conscious decision rather than her inheritance. Some things become yours twice: once when you make them, and again when you refuse to let convenience take them away.

But he thought, too, about Mrs. Alvarez ringing up her own lunch order to tell three tables of strangers that Jasmine was a woman. About the Portland bookseller taking down a tie-in display and replacing it with his plain black cover. About Jasmine at the Wound, choosing to keep the sword rather than put it down, because somewhere in the writing of her, twenty years earlier, he had understood something he hadn't fully understood about himself until this exact moment: that some things become yours not because you were given them, but because you refused, at the critical moment, to let them be taken.

"No," he told Priya. "Tell them no."

"They may come back with a higher number."

“No.”

“Substantially higher.”

“Still no.”

“Localad, I am professionally required to ensure you fully understand all of the financial implications of your decision.”

"It doesn't matter what number they come back with," Localad said. "I already sold this story once for a number that seemed impossible to turn down. I know now what that number actually costs. I'm not doing it again. No way."

“Good.” A fractional warmth entered her voice. “I am personally delighted for you.”

Priya delivered the refusal to the studio the following day, in a language that Localad had reviewed and approved himself. It was, polite, professional, absolutely final and only four sentences long. Priya believed that when a door was being closed, excessive prose merely provided grasping fingers with somewhere to grip.

And the studio's response? Silence, once again, the same silence that had already failed to contain the earlier controversy. The studio did not reply.

This told Localad, more clearly than any negotiation could have, that they had understood exactly what he'd meant.

He told Marjory that night, over dinner at her kitchen table, the same table where she'd once told him that being brave meant finishing the book anyway, scared or not.

"Well, how does it feel then?" she asked, "turning down that kind of money? Enough money to buy most of Meridian Cove?"

He fully considered the question with a complete honesty, weighing it all against the six-figure cheque that had once felt like the largest, most impossible relief of his entire life.

"Lighter," he said, finally, surprising himself with how quickly and easily the word had arrived into the conversation. "It feels a lot lighter than saying yes ever did."

“Really?”

“Yes, it does.”

She studied him.

The Localad who had once left for Los Angeles, would have treated the offer as proof that the world had finally measured him correctly. The man now sitting opposite her, had discovered that being valued and being bought were not exactly, the same experience.

Marjory raised her glass.

“To being exceptionally unaffordable.” she toasted.

“I’m not unaffordable.”

“But you just rejected a huge fortune.”

“I’m unavailable.”

“Ooo,” she said, “that is much sexier.”

Localad nearly dropped his fork.

Marjory smiled into her glass of wine as the two of them relaxed and settled into their evening together.

The shop downstairs finally rested itself for the night, complete with the soundtrack of associated cracks and creaks that accompany any old building after the stresses of an ordinarily unspectacular day's business.

The studio’s offer slowly vanished into its own silence.

Purradise still remained in print and continued smashing all records.

And somewhere in Los Angeles, a spreadsheet had developed a bright red cell whereby several suited executives experienced a feeling they could only describe as 'market concern' because regret was not yet included in their company approved terminology.

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