Darkest Hour recap

Suze takes a summer job minding Jack Slater, a frightened boy staying at a Pebble Beach resort, and quickly realizes he sees the dead as she does. His older brother Paul does too, calls people like them shifters rather than mediators, and claims to know far more about the ability than Father Dominic. Meanwhile Suze's stepfather starts excavating the backyard for a hot tub, and the ghost of Maria de Silva, a nineteenth-century woman engaged to her cousin Hector, appears to demand the digging stop. Research reveals that Hector, who supposedly vanished in 1850, is Jesse: he was murdered in the house on Maria's orders by Felix Diego, the man she married instead, and buried in the yard. Maria and Diego attack to keep it hidden, and Suze is badly hurt driving them out. Jesse's remains are found and buried properly, freeing him to move on, and he stays instead, for Suze. Paul leaves promising to return.

Susannah Simon is a mediator: she sees and speaks with the dead, who come to her to have whatever holds them here finished, and she has kept it from her family her whole life. Her mother's remarriage moved her from Brooklyn to Carmel-by-the-Sea, into a house her stepfather Andy is restoring, with three stepbrothers she privately calls Sleepy, Dopey and Doc. Her bedroom came with Jesse, the ghost of a young man who died in that room in the nineteenth century and has never said why he stayed; over a year he has become the person she tells the truth to, and neither of them will name what else he has become. At the Junipero Serra Mission Academy the principal, Father Dominic, turned out to be a mediator as well, and the two work together while disagreeing about method: he counsels the dead, she fights them. Suze has driven a violent ghost out of the school, carried a dead woman's message into a wealthy family's affairs, and stopped four dead teenagers from killing the boy they blamed for their crash, learning afterward that he had earned their anger.

Summer in Carmel, and Suze needs a job. She is hired to look after Jack Slater, a young boy staying with his family at a Pebble Beach resort, and finds him exhausted, withdrawn and terrified. It takes her very little time to work out why: Jack sees the dead exactly as she does, has no idea what he is, and has been treated by the adults around him as a problem to be managed. His older brother Paul is charming, attentive and openly interested in Suze. At home, Andy has decided the backyard needs a hot tub, which means digging up ground that has been undisturbed since the house was built.

Suze begins teaching Jack what she knows, against the wishes of his parents, who would rather he stopped talking about it. Paul encourages her, then tells her why: he sees the dead too. He calls people like them shifters rather than mediators and claims to know far more about what they can do than Father Dominic has ever admitted to. Meanwhile a ghost arrives at the Ackerman house: Maria de Silva, a young woman from an old Californian family, dressed for the middle of the nineteenth century, who orders Suze to stop the excavation in the backyard and threatens her when she refuses. With CeeCee's help Suze traces the family history and finds that Maria was engaged to her own cousin, Hector de Silva, who disappeared in 1850 on his way to marry her and was assumed to have run off. The portrait that comes with the story is unmistakably Jesse.

Jesse never ran. He was killed in the boarding house that later became the Ackermans' home, and buried in the yard Andy is about to dig up, which is why Maria wants the work stopped. Suze keeps as much of this from Jesse as she can while she works out the rest of it, and finds that Maria is not acting alone: Felix Diego, the man Maria married after her cousin vanished, is with her, and he is the one who does the harm. The threats become attacks. Suze's work with Jack continues alongside it, and Paul's interest in her sharpens as he realizes how little she knows about what they are. The excavation goes ahead on schedule.

The confrontation comes at the house, and it is the most dangerous fight Suze has been in. The whole of it comes out: Maria had no intention of marrying a cousin she did not want, arranged for Diego to kill him in that room, and the two of them have spent a century and a half making sure nobody found the body. Jesse, who never understood why he could not leave, hears it from the people who killed him. Suze is seriously injured before it ends, but Maria and Diego are driven off for good, and the bones in the backyard are uncovered.

Jesse's remains are given a proper burial, and with his murder accounted for and his body at rest there is nothing left to hold him here. Suze spends the end of the book expecting to lose him. He does not go: Jesse chooses to stay, and the reason is her, which neither of them has any idea what to do with and which does not change the fact that one of them is dead. Suze recovers from her injuries with the usual explanations at home. Jack leaves with his family at the end of the summer, steadier than he arrived and no longer believing he is the only one. Paul goes with them, promising to be back, and leaves Suze with the knowledge that he understands what they can do far better than Father Dominic ever has.

Jesse's remains are found in the Ackermans' backyard and given a proper burial, and the murder that kept him here is finally uncovered: Maria de Silva, who did not want to marry the cousin she was engaged to, had Felix Diego kill him in the boarding house that became Suze's home, and the two spent a century and a half keeping it quiet. Maria and Diego are driven off for good, and Suze is seriously hurt doing it. With his death accounted for and his body at rest, nothing is holding Jesse here, and Suze has to face losing him. He does not go. Jesse chooses to stay, and the reason is Suze, which neither of them knows what to do with, and which changes nothing about the fact that one of them is dead. Jack Slater leaves at the end of the summer no longer frightened of what he can see and knowing he is not the only one. Paul Slater leaves too, making it clear he intends to come back, and that he knows a great deal more about what people like them can do than Father Dominic has ever told her.