Remain

She returns the next day, crouching beneath the dining table for a lost jigsaw puzzle piece — though a thousand-piece puzzle and a sweating glass of ice water have materialized on a table that was bare moments ago.

She introduces herself as Wren,² mentions her fourth-grade teacher Ethel Lampier, and recommends a Keats poem about beauty that never passes into nothingness. When Tate¹ rushes outside to bring Louise⁵ and Reece⁶ as witnesses, he returns to find Wren,² the puzzle, and the glass all gone.

Reece⁶ goes pale, then furious: Wren Tobin² died almost two years ago. Tate¹ googles her name and stares at photographs that match the woman exactly — same face, same Patriots sweatshirt. His mind couldn't have conjured someone he'd never seen. She is not a hallucination.

Tate¹ wakes to crying in the hallway bathroom. He finds a towel-wrapped figure near the bathtub who repeatedly smashes the back of her head into the faucet — the sound like something detonating on asphalt. When he hits the lights, she vanishes.

Tate¹ has taped every window and door, strung threads across the stairs — all undisturbed. His phone captures the audio but no visual: the click of a latch, squealing pipes, sickening crunches. No one entered the house.

Oscar³ hears the recording and offers the only rational response: if every possibility is impossible, whichever seems least impossible must be the truth. Tate¹ decides to stay and help Wren² rather than flee. He buys a game of Charades at a downtown toy store — which, he discovers, Wren² herself once co-owned.

During afternoon visits, Daytime Wren² appears as her living self: warm, funny, radiant. She can conjure objects — glasses of wine, plates of fruit — but cannot touch anything in the real world. She teaches Tate¹ to do laundry, start a fire, and cook beef bourguignon from Julia Child's recipe.

They play Charades for hours, Tate¹ so hopeless that his guesses — balloon pasta, hungry funerals — reduce them both to helpless laughter. Between rounds, she reveals fragments of her troubled life: Grandma Joyce,¹³ who raised her after her mother died.

Nash,⁸ her business partner, who stole fifty thousand dollars. Griffin,⁷ her estranged husband, whose violence terrified her. Dax,⁹ a married counselor who became obsessed after she confided in him. She fades at sunset each evening, dissolving into the gathering dark.

Two versions of Wren² occupy the same house but inhabit different realities. By day she is bright and unaware of her death. By night she appears bloated and gray-skinned, her skull wound bleeding, trapped in the bathroom where she drowned.

During one nighttime visit, she manages a sandpapery whisper: she died in the bathtub. But when Tate¹ says she slipped, she says no. She was murdered. She doesn't know by whom — her terror eclipses memory. In previous encounters, Tate¹ noticed her back arching as if yanked by the hair, her body stumbling backward as though dragged.

Not the mechanics of a fall — the mechanics of an attack. Oscar³ frames the mission: Tate¹ must earn Daytime Wren's² trust and find her killer before the nighttime version consumes what remains.

Oscar³ leverages his local connections to learn that the medical examiner labeled Wren's² death suspicious, not accidental. The wound was on the back of her head — yet she would have faced the faucet. No towel lay near the tub.

Armed with this, Tate¹ and Oscar³ confront Nash⁸ at the toy store about the stolen money; Nash⁸ erupts and orders them out. At the Mercy Center, they present Dax⁹ with his own obsessive love letter, found in Wren's² belongings; he coolly denies writing it and threatens defamation.

At the festival grounds, they challenge Griffin's⁷ claim of reconciliation; Griffin⁷ lunges at Tate¹ in fury. Each man denies involvement. Each has a plausible account for the night Wren² died. Tate¹ and Oscar³ leave with suspicions sharpened but proof still elusive.

Tessa,¹⁰ Dax's⁹ wife, follows them and confronts Tate¹ on the street. She insists Wren² initiated everything — kissing Dax,⁹ then calling the police when he refused her. She reveals that Wren² pursued Griffin⁷ while he was engaged to another woman, and that seducing unavailable men was Wren's² lifelong pattern.

Louise,⁵ the caretaker, offers her own account: Wren² was spoiled, couldn't keep friends, caused Joyce¹³ sleepless nights, and pressured her grandmother into financing the toy store. Oscar³ privately warns Tate¹ that everyone has an agenda — including Wren² herself.

Tate¹ cannot reconcile these portraits with the woman he knows, but he can't dismiss them either. Meanwhile, Wren's² daytime appearances shorten, her image flickering to translucence with increasing frequency — a battery draining toward zero.

On their last full afternoon together, firelight painting the parlor, Wren² proposes a game: get as close as possible without making contact. She traces the plane of his face without touching it; he outlines her collarbone and shoulder. The air between their palms hums with electricity.

Later, she leads him upstairs. They undress, standing inches apart, each mapping the other's body in charged silence — an intimacy rendered more exquisite by the impossibility of a single touch. Tate¹ whispers that he loves her, words he has never said to anyone.

She whispers it back. Her form stutters and fades as the sun drops, but not before they lie together on the bed, exchanging heated whispers. She mentions plans to attend the festival, then take a warm bath. Tate's¹ stomach twists at the words.

That evening, Tate¹ discovers the power is out. Opening the cellar door, he feels a hard shove at his back and tumbles into darkness. Someone descends after him, striking him repeatedly with something heavy.

In the pitch-black cellar, Tate¹ fights back with a laundry iron, landing blows until the attacker flees into the woods. Battered and bleeding, he drives to the festival with Oscar³ to identify who did it. Griffin⁷ has been managing a broken generator since five o'clock — dozens of witnesses. Nash's⁸ friend confirms they arrived together before five.

Oscar³ locates Dax⁹ and Tessa¹⁰ in the crowd. Every suspect has an alibi. The killer is someone Tate¹ never considered. His peripheral flickering splits into two signals — one pulling him urgently home, the other hovering softly over the festival.

Back at the powerless house, Tate¹ lights candles and enters the bathroom. He watches Wren's² murder play out like a film only he can see. She hums as she draws a bath, wearing her grandmother's heart-shaped locket. The door bursts open. A figure in a cheap emoji mask seizes her hair and drags her backward, smashing her skull into the faucet with a sickening crunch.

Then a second, smaller figure appears — both hold Wren² beneath the water until she stops moving. The smaller figure reaches into the tub and removes the locket from Wren's² neck. Tate's¹ blood turns to ice. He has seen that locket before — around Louise's⁵ neck, on the day he arrived. Before he can move, a blow from behind sends him crashing to the floor.

Reece⁶ strikes Tate¹ unconscious, then sets the house ablaze with a flaming pan and cognac. Wren² — now fully aware she's dead after confronting her own corpse in the tub — sees everything but cannot physically intervene.

When Oscar³ arrives in his SUV, she presses herself against the parlor window, mouthing his name, pointing at the floor where Tate¹ lies. Oscar³ sees her — the first person besides Tate¹ to do so — and runs for the door. Louise⁵ rams him with Reece's⁶ truck. Inside the inferno, Wren² kneels beside Tate¹ and whispers that she loves him, begging him to wake.

His eyes flutter open. He staggers through the front door as the parlor explodes behind him, then drags Oscar³ across the gravel to safety. Debris from the blast kills Reece.⁶ Police arrive as Louise⁵ raises a crowbar over Tate.¹

Days later, Tate¹ returns to the charred foundation on crutches. The house is ash and blackened timber — only one corner still stands, preserved like a stage for a final scene. He calls Wren's² name, and she appears behind him in a white dress, luminous and at peace. She knows everything now — what Reece⁶ and Louise⁵ did, what Tate¹ sacrificed to help her.

She tells him Sylvia⁴ watches over him still. She asks him to live well, love deeply, treasure friends, and honor the gifts he's been given. They play the no-touching game one last time, tracing each other's faces in the open air. She tells him she loved him from the moment they met. Then her outline fades, dissolves, and she is gone. Behind him, the last standing wall crashes to the ground.