Marnie's Ghost

by Stephanie Maynard, Ai (Illustrator)

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 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 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.

299 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2026

About the author

Stephanie lives in a 1940's floating home on the Columbia River with her twelve-year-old daughter and a large, ever-changing menagerie of animals. English history was her favorite subject in college, and she now understands why.

When she is not busy being the mom of a fiercely independent young hellion or penning new stories, Steph enjoys sailing and discovering quirky new coffeehouses.

Reviews

[Eugenea Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

An art conservator for the Chicago Institute of Art, a 200-year-old painting she is assigned to clean and restore, a handsome tragic gentleman who “lives” in that painting, his inexplicable escape into reality, their passionate love affair facilitated by her declining condition which follows a diagnosis of leukemia. . .this author performs a juggling act with life, sickness, and death only dropping one or two of those occasionally. Good show, Stephanie!

[Petrozilia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good story made tedious by overworked prose. Not every sentence needs to be a poem and not every noun needs 3-5 adjectives. This would have been more enjoyable with a little more detachment.