Remembrance recap

Suze Simon is in her mid-twenties, working as the guidance counselor at her old school in Carmel and engaged to Jesse, who is alive in the present day and training as a doctor. Two things arrive at once: a student at the school is plainly being tormented by something nobody else can see, and Paul Slater comes back to town. Paul has acquired the old house Suze grew up in, the one where Jesse died, and is entirely willing to destroy it; he offers Suze terms for keeping it, which she does not want and does not tell Jesse about. Handling both alone, as she has always done, makes both worse. The haunting at the school turns dangerous and Suze is drawn fully back into the work she thought she had left behind as a teenager. In the end the case is resolved, Paul does not get what he wanted, and Suze and Jesse are married.

Susannah Simon is a mediator: she sees and speaks with the dead, and ghosts with unfinished business seek her out. As a teenager she moved from Brooklyn to Carmel-by-the-Sea when her widowed mother married Andy Ackerman, gaining three stepbrothers and a bedroom already occupied by the ghost of a young man murdered there in 1850. At the Junipero Serra Mission Academy she found that the principal, Father Dominic, was a mediator too, and the two worked through years of hauntings together while disagreeing about method: he counseled the dead, she fought them. She eventually learned the ghost's story. He was Hector de Silva, called Jesse, killed on the orders of the cousin he was engaged to and buried in the backyard; when his remains were found and laid to rest he was free to move on and stayed instead, for her. She also met Paul Slater, who has the same ability, calls it shifting, and knows far more about it than Father Dominic. Paul used that knowledge against her, threatening to travel into the past and prevent Jesse's murder so that Suze would never meet him. Suze went after him, and what came out of it was Jesse alive in the present day, with a life to build and a future with Suze in it. Years later they are engaged, and Paul is still out there.

Suze is in her mid-twenties and back at the Mission Academy, this time as its guidance counselor, working for a much older Father Dominic. Jesse is alive, training as a doctor, and the two are engaged and planning their wedding. Neither of them has needed her old abilities much in recent years. That changes on two fronts at once: a student she is counseling is plainly being tormented by something nobody else can see, and Paul Slater comes back to Carmel.

Paul has acquired the old house Suze grew up in, the one where Jesse died and where his body lay for a century and a half, and he is entirely willing to have it torn down. He offers Suze terms for saving it, terms she has no intention of accepting and no intention of repeating to Jesse. Keeping it to herself is the same instinct that got her through her teens, and it works no better now. At the school, the haunting of her student proves older and more tangled than a straightforward angry ghost, and Suze finds herself doing the work she thought she had grown out of, now with a professional role and somebody else's child to answer for.

The case at the school turns dangerous and stops being containable, and Suze's habit of managing everything alone costs her as much as it ever did. Jesse, who is neither a ghost nor a teenager any more, is not willing to be protected out of the situation, and what Suze has not told him about Paul comes out. Father Dominic, older and less able to help than he once was, is drawn in as well. Paul's approach hardens as it becomes clear that the price he named is not going to be paid, and the wedding Suze is supposed to be arranging keeps colliding with everything else.

The haunting at the school is resolved and Suze and Jesse are married. Paul does not get what he demanded; once Suze stops handling him alone and brings Jesse and Father Dominic in, the leverage he had built the whole approach on stops working. He is not finished with them, though: what he knows about shifting is still his, and he stays a fixture at the edge of their lives rather than a chapter that closes. Suze ends the book married, still working at the school where she grew up, and clear that becoming an adult with a career has not stopped the dead from finding her.

The haunting at the school is resolved, and Suze and Jesse are married. Paul does not get what he demanded of her, and the leverage he built the whole approach on stops working once Suze stops handling it alone and lets Jesse and Father Dominic in. What Paul is left holding is his knowledge of what shifters can do, which he still has and still intends to use, so he remains a permanent presence at the edge of their lives rather than a problem that has been closed. Suze finishes the book with the marriage she has been waiting years for, a job at the school where she grew up, and the understanding that being an adult with a career has not stopped the dead coming to her, only changed what it costs her when they do.