Marnie's Ghost

Marnie Lawson has spent her life bringing ruined things back from the brink. A Chicago art conservator who survived what should have killed her — the leukemia and the fiancé who walked out the moment she got sick. She has learned to live small and carefully, and to expect very little.

Then a damaged portrait comes to her bench: a Regency gentleman, beautiful and unhappy, dead in a duel two hundred years ago. As Marnie lifts away the grime and the yellowed varnish, cleaning his face back into the light, she begins to feel him in the room with her. To hear him. To love him.

Noel Ashbourne is real. And there is a terrible logic to how she can see him at all — she can only because she is, once again, close to dying. The sicker she grows, the more solid he becomes, until she can take his cold hand in her own. To keep him, she would have to let go of her life. To live, she would have to lose the one love that ever truly saw her.

And beneath Noel's painted face, Marnie uncovers the ghost of a second figure — a woman someone erased from the canvas long ago — and begins to understand how old this bargain between being kept and being seen really is.

For readers who lost their hearts to The Time Traveler's Wife and Somewhere in Time — a devastating love story about illness and art, faith and erasure, and what we will trade for one true thing.