Truman Burbank is free. But freedom, it turns out, is terrifying.

He walks the world with too-wide eyes and too-tight shoulders, flinching at passing cameras and automatic doors that hiss just a little too knowingly. He doesn’t trust mirrors. He doesn’t trust strangers. Most of all, he doesn’t trust the silence—it always used to mean someone was watching.

Then he walks into a bookstore. A real one.

It smells like old paper and bergamot tea. There’s a calico cat sleeping in a sunbeam. And behind the counter, there’s someone who doesn’t look at him like a headline. Doesn’t freeze. Doesn’t ask what it was like to be the most watched man in history.

She just smiles. Says, “Let me know if you need help finding anything.”

He mumbles something about not being much of a reader.

She tilts her head, thoughtful. “That’s okay. I’m really good at matchmaking.”

She hands him a worn copy of The Little Prince. He takes it like it might bite.

⸻

He comes back the next day. She’s still there. Still smiling. Still not asking.

“You didn’t dog-ear the pages,” she says, pleased. “That’s how I know you’re a good one.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just… stays. Browses. Lets her talk about poetry and bookbinding and how she swears the espresso machine is haunted. He listens like someone trying to memorize the world.

No cameras. No cues. Just her voice and the creak of the floorboards.

One day, he asks if she believes people can start over.

She doesn’t flinch.

“I think some people don’t get a choice. They just have to.”

He nods. She offers him a seat behind the counter. He takes it.

⸻

He doesn’t know what this is yet. Maybe friendship. Maybe safety. Maybe something like falling in love for real—for the first time.

Whatever it is, it’s not scripted. And for once, that feels like a good thing.