Fourteen years before the Georgia Flu, Arthur Leander and Miranda wait by a restaurant coat check in Toronto, speaking quietly because Miranda has a visible bruise and is afraid of being overheard. Miranda tells Arthur she is going to leave the man she is with and cannot go home, and Arthur immediately supports her and asks what she needs.

As they collect their coats, a hostess covertly texts a photographer who has paid her for tips. Outside, Arthur insists Miranda stay with him at his hotel “no strings attached,” and Miranda, overwhelmed, agrees. Trying to hide her face, Miranda puts on oversized sunglasses as Arthur puts an arm around her, but they step into a camera flash anyway, creating the tabloid photograph.

In the aftermath, a journalist presses Arthur to identify the “mystery brunette,” and Arthur deflects by calling her “from my hometown.” The narration then traces Arthur’s past: his claustrophobic, beautiful childhood on remote Delano Island; his escape to Toronto at seventeen; his drift from university into acting; his close early friendship with Clark; and his gradual rise through theater school, New York jobs, and Hollywood roles into uncomfortable, escalating fame.

During a Toronto film shoot years earlier, Arthur’s mother asked him to take Susie’s niece Miranda to lunch, partly because Miranda also came from the island and might understand him. At seventeen, Miranda was strikingly composed and thrilled by Toronto’s anonymity; Arthur and Miranda talk about her art-school life and Arthur’s disorienting celebrity, then part politely, and Arthur pushes thoughts of her away as his career and relationships continue.

Back in the present of the flashback, Arthur is thirty-six and increasingly photographed wherever he goes. Alone in his hotel room, unsettled by fame and suddenly certain of what he wants, he finally calls the cell number he has saved for years: Miranda’s.