Marnie Lawson takes paint off. She lifts the varnish, the grime, the overpainting somebody once paid for, and finds the thing underneath that somebody couldn't bear to leave visible.

Six months out of chemotherapy, she goes back to work on a portrait she has known since childhood: a Regency gentleman in a blue coat who died, the label says, in a duel in 1819. Under the brown she finds a second figure, painted out beside him. And a cold that stands at her side while she works, attentive, and asks her for nothing.

Then, on a Tuesday, she turns her head and he doesn't vanish.

Noel Ashbourne has been in the dark for two hundred years, and he tells her the truth on the first clear night: she can see him because something in her is wearing thin. Get well, and she loses him. Keep him, and she doesn't get well.

For readers of The Time Traveler's Wife and Bid Time Return (Somewhere in Time), Marnie's Ghost is a love story about the people we paint over, the ones who take the paint off, and the bravest romantic act there is.

Stephanie Maynard

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