Chapter Twenty-nine:  The Confrontation

Localad regarded this as somewhat suspicious.

He was coming, completely unannounced except for a text message sent that morning.  Hey, I'm in the area, can I stop by, no agenda, I promise. And Localad, watching the same rental sedan model pull up outside the shop that had once delivered a stranger into his life eighteen months earlier, felt a strange, looping sense of déjà vu that he didn't fully shake even after Desmond had parked, gotten out, and walked through the shop's cracked door-bell entrance, this time without any car trouble.

Desmond entered Harbour & Page, and the cracked bell produced the same metallic collapse that had first introduced him eighteen months earlier.

“You still haven’t fixed that bell?”

“It has representation now.”

Desmond sat in the reading chair by the window.

He looked older this time. Not dramatically older; Hollywood forbids visible time without negotiation. But the smoothness had worn thin. He seemed less like a producer arriving in and commanding a room and more like a man who had driven a long way to say something pretty difficult.

"Confession time. I do have an agenda," Desmond admitted, within the first five minutes, sitting in the same reading chair by the window where he'd once devoured the first three chapters of Localad's manuscript in under an hour. "I lied in the text. I'm sorry. I wanted to see you in person before I said this, and I wanted to say it without Priya or the legal department drafting the words for me first."

“Well that simplifies the trust portion of the meeting. Go ahead.”

Desmond smiled, then stopped smiling.

“The studio wants a sequel.”

Localad said nothing.

"They want to do a sequel," Desmond said. "Not the sequel Trent originally planned. That one's well gone, dead and buried, box office didn't support it, everyone's moved on. This one would be completely different. Smaller budget. And they want—" he paused, choosing his next words with visible care, "they want you to write it. Not co-write. Write it. Start to finish. First-position credit, creative control clauses that would actually mean something this time, final cut on the ending, no restraint clause on this contract, none at all. I fought for every one of those terms myself, because I think, finally, I understand what it actually costs to not fight for them."

Localad looked at him for a long moment, weighing the offer against everything it represented. Not merely money, though the number Desmond eventually named was, again, substantial, but a real chance, framed carefully as an act of contrition, to go back into the machine that had once taken his story apart and rebuild something closer to what he'd actually meant, this time with the protections he hadn't known to ask for the first time around.

“What do you think? Smaller budget. You write it alone. First-position credit. Meaningful creative control. Final authority over the ending. No non-disparagement clause. Publishing rights untouched. Priya can rewrite the protections herself if she likes.”

“I’m sure she would like.”

“I know.”

Desmond restated the fee.

"Why now?" Localad asked. "Why this offer, after everything we’ve already been through?"

"Because the numbers on your book keep climbing, and the studio's finally noticed that the story people actually want more of is the one you wrote, not the one we made," Desmond said, with a bluntness that Localad, at least, appreciated. "And because I've spent eighteen months watching what happened to you, and to it, and I don't want to be part of doing that to anyone ever again, including you. I'm not going to pretend the studio's motives are purely artistic. They're not. They’re in it for the money. But my offer to fight for your terms this time, for real, isn't a marketing calculation. That part's just me, trying to fix something I helped break."

The old Localad would have heard salvation. The newer one just heard the word ‘terms’.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because your book keeps selling and the film has become nothing more than the answer to trivia questions.” Desmond looked down at his hands. “And because I helped take something true and teach it to lie loudly.”

The shop settled around them.

“I told myself I was protecting the project,” Desmond continued. “Then I told myself I was protecting your credit. Then I told myself I was protecting my ability to help later. There is always a noble explanation available when cowardice has an expense account.”

Localad had never heard Desmond speak without managing the room before.

“I’m not asking you to absolve me,” Desmond said. “I’m asking whether you’d consider coming back under terms that prevent what happened the last time.”

Localad considered it.

He imagined the knights being restored. Jasmine central. Purradise on screen with its old strangeness intact: mountains singing slightly flat, cats refusing prophecy on grammatical grounds, the Wound remaining open because closure was not the same as healing.

He thought about it quite seriously. More seriously, he suspected, than Desmond had expected him to, weighing the shape of a sequel that might actually honour the real story and an ending that stayed quiet because the contract finally said it could. He thought about how satisfying it might feel to walk back into that glass-walled conference room not as a nervous first-timer with no leverage, but as a bestselling, award-shortlisted author whose name now meant something the studio actually needed.

And then he thought about the shop, and the book’s twentieth-print run stacked by the window, and Marjory's hand-painted sign, and the letter from the literary foundation still pinned to the bulletin board behind the register, and about how it had taken him eighteen months of losing almost everything to fully understand what actually mattered to him, and about how easy it would be, holding an offer this good, to convince himself that this time would be different simply because he wanted it to be.

The fantasy was satisfying. That was why it required caution.

“You fought for all these terms?” Localad asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to prove I’m not the man I was.”

Localad nodded. “That’s not a good reason to make a film.”

Desmond looked startled, then gave a tired laugh.

“No. It isn’t.”

“Listen, I believe you mean the apology. I believe you really fought. But I don’t want to write a sequel.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Because Purradise is finished.”

Desmond waited for more.

There was no more. 

The sentence stood in the room with the quiet authority of a locked door.

"I appreciate the offer," he said, finally. "I mean that completely, Desmond. I believe you fought for those terms. I believe you mean what you're saying about wanting to fix something. But I don't want to write the sequel."

"Can I ask why?"

“I spent twenty years not finishing Purradise,” Localad said. “Then everyone spent eighteen months trying to persuade me the ending I finally got to, was just a starting point for something more profitable. It isn’t. It’s the end. Because I’ve already told the story I wanted to tell," Localad said. "I told it completely, exactly the way I meant it, and it's sitting on my own shelves right now, unedited, uncompromised, doing better than either of us predicted it ever would do. I really don't need a sequel to prove anything to anyone anymore. I think I'd rather write something new."

Desmond looked toward the shelves of black-covered books.

“What will you write?”

“Something else.”

“Do you know what?”

“Not yet. But I’ll bet the studio wouldn’t touch it,” he smiled.

Desmond stood.

At the counter he paused beside Localad’s father’s photograph.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “the first three chapters of your book, were still the best hour I’ve ever had reading anything in twenty years.”

Localad believed him.

They shook hands.

“Call me if you change your mind.”

Desmond then left without a book, a contract or a rescued franchise.

He left with something less marketable and more useful: a refusal he had actually earned.

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