Ghosted

Ghosted Plot Summary

Introduction

# When Love Collides with Buried Truths The sheep stood in the middle of Sapperton village green, staring at Eddie David with those sideways eyes that only sheep possess. Sarah Mackey heard his laughter rolling across the green like cool air before she saw the man himself, cross-legged in the scorching June heat, having what appeared to be a serious conversation with the escaped animal. It was June 2nd, 1997—nineteen years to the day since the accident that had torn her world apart and sent her fleeing to California. She'd returned to this Gloucestershire valley every year since, drawn back like a moth to flame, to walk the same paths and remember her sister Hannah. But this time would be different. This time, a stranger with warm ocean-colored eyes would pull her into seven days that felt like a lifetime, only to vanish without explanation, leaving Sarah questioning not just his silence, but his very identity. Some coincidences are too perfect to be accidents, and some secrets too dangerous to survive the light of day.

Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Seven Perfect Days and a Vanishing Act

The heat was furnace-hot that afternoon when Sarah found Eddie negotiating with Lucy the sheep on Sapperton green. His phone kept ringing—calls he'd cancel with quick, practiced movements—but his attention stayed fixed on the ridiculous conversation he was having with the animal. When Sarah offered to help return Lucy to his field, Eddie's face lit up with the kind of uncomplicated joy she hadn't seen in years. They ended up at the Daneway pub, where afternoon dissolved into evening over pints of cider. Eddie carved furniture in a barn hidden deep in Siccaridge Wood, living like some benevolent hermit among the trees. Sarah ran a charity in Los Angeles, training Clowndoctors to work with sick children. They discovered they'd grown up in the same valley, walked the same paths, sat by the same river counting dragonflies. The coincidences felt magical, as if the universe had been quietly arranging their meeting for decades. Seven days later, Sarah was living in Eddie's woodland clearing, sleeping in his bed beneath skylights that framed the storm-lashed sky. They made love in the leaves beneath an ancient beech tree where someone had mysteriously placed a Wellington boot sixty feet up the trunk. Eddie gave her Mouse, a tiny wooden carving he'd made as a nine-year-old boy—his talisman, his most precious possession. On their final morning, Eddie held Sarah's face in his hands and spoke the words that would haunt her: "I think I might have fallen in love with you." He was leaving for a windsurfing holiday in Spain, but they made plans. She would meet him at Gatwick. They would figure out how to bridge the Atlantic between them. The future felt as certain as sunrise. But Eddie David never called. The man who'd promised to phone from the airport, who'd taken her number and her parents' address, who'd friended her on Facebook and sworn he'd miss her—simply vanished. Sarah waited in Leicester, caring for her grandfather, checking her phone with increasing desperation. Days became weeks. The silence stretched like a wound that wouldn't heal.

Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Descent into Digital Obsession

Sarah's friends watched her unravel with the horrified fascination of witnesses to a car crash. Tommy, her oldest friend, offered theories about broken phones and delayed flights while his eyebrows betrayed his growing concern. Jo, blunt as a hammer, insisted that men simply didn't call—it was the oldest story in the world. But Sarah couldn't accept it. The connection she'd felt with Eddie had been too real, too mutual, too profound to dismiss. She began the digital stalking that would consume her: checking Eddie's Facebook obsessively, downloading WhatsApp and Messenger to track when he'd last been online. She sent messages that grew increasingly desperate, called his workshop number until she knew his voicemail greeting by heart. The rational part of her mind screamed warnings, but she was powerless to stop. This wasn't her—Sarah Mackey, the composed charity executive who gave speeches to medical conferences. This was someone else entirely, someone she didn't recognize. The worst part was the hope. Every buzz of her phone sent adrenaline flooding through her system. Every notification was a potential reprieve from the agony of not knowing. She found herself checking dating apps to see if Eddie was registered, scouring his business website for clues, analyzing every photo on his social media accounts for signs of another woman. There were none. Eddie David had simply stopped existing online the day she'd left his house. When she finally worked up the courage to write a public post on his Facebook wall—"Has anyone seen Eddie recently? Have been trying to get in touch with him. A bit worried"—the responses only deepened the mystery. His football teammate Alan had been looking for him too. Eddie had canceled their holiday without explanation. Another friend reported he'd missed weeks of football matches. The hashtag WheresWally appeared, as if Eddie David had become a puzzle to solve rather than a person who'd simply chosen silence. The breaking point came at a football pitch in Battersea, where Sarah tracked down Eddie's team based on a trophy she'd glimpsed in his barn. She arrived during their post-match drinks, somehow convincing herself this was reasonable behavior. Instead, she walked into their changing room, confronting a dozen half-naked men who stared at her in stunned silence before erupting in laughter.

Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Shadows of a Nineteen-Year-Old Tragedy

The obsession with Eddie began to crack open doors Sarah had kept locked for nineteen years. She found herself back in the landscape of her childhood trauma, reliving the day that had split her life into before and after. Hannah had been twelve years old, full of fierce opinions and fearless adventures. She was the sister who'd insisted on camping in the high field behind their house, who'd led expeditions through cow parsley tunnels, who'd made Sarah feel protective and proud and sometimes exasperated by her boundless energy. The accident happened on a bend in the Cirencester Road, where flowers still hung from a tree nearly two decades later. Sarah had been driving—seventeen years old, newly licensed, taking Hannah to meet friends in town. The details remained mercifully blurred, but the aftermath was crystal clear: the ambulance crew laying Hannah out on the grass verge, the impossible stillness of her sister's small body, the way their parents' faces had changed forever in the space between one heartbeat and the next. The man who'd caused the crash had fled the scene, escaping through fields and footpaths while Sarah sat trapped in twisted metal, calling Hannah's name. For weeks, police had searched for him—described only as male, late teens or early twenties. When they finally arrested someone, Sarah was already gone, fled to Los Angeles where Tommy's family had offered refuge. She'd never learned the man's name, never seen his face, never confronted the person whose reckless driving had stolen her sister's future. Now, as Eddie's silence stretched into its fourth week, Sarah felt the old paranoia returning. The sense that the world had raised its whip and was choosing where to let it fall. She began to wonder if Eddie's appearance in her life had been more than coincidence. He'd been on Broad Ride that morning, the same path she walked every year on the anniversary. He'd known exactly where to find her, exactly what to say. Her grandfather, bitter and failing in his Leicester hospital bed, offered unexpected wisdom when Sarah finally broke down and told him everything. He spoke of his own lost love, Ruby Merryfield, the woman he'd abandoned due to family pressure and social expectations. "I should never have given up on her," he said, his voice thick with decades of regret. "When you know, you know. And I knew, and I let it go without any real sort of a fight." His words gave Sarah permission to keep searching, even as everyone else urged her to let Eddie go.

Chapter 4: Chapter 4: Crossing Lines in the Search for Truth

Sarah's behavior crossed lines she'd never imagined approaching. She called hospitals, searched death notices, even considered hiring a private investigator. When Eddie finally appeared online and read her messages without responding, the rejection felt like a physical blow. She watched the gray bubble appear and disappear as he typed and deleted responses she'd never see. The cruelty of it—being acknowledged but ignored—was somehow worse than silence. The team captain, Martin, walked her back to the road with a mixture of kindness and concern after the changing room incident. "You don't want to find him," Martin told her, his words carrying a weight that chilled her. "Please trust me. You do not want to find Eddie David." But he wouldn't explain what he meant, leaving Sarah with more questions and a growing certainty that Eddie was hiding something significant. The man she'd fallen in love with might not exist at all. Back in London, staying with Tommy and his girlfriend Zoe, Sarah discovered her friends were conducting their own secret affair. Jo, her blunt, loyal friend from their California days, had been sneaking into Tommy's flat for midnight encounters while Zoe traveled for work. The revelation should have been shocking, but Sarah was too consumed by her own unraveling to properly process their happiness. She watched them declare their love in Zoe's pristine kitchen at three in the morning, feeling like a ghost haunting someone else's life. The anonymous text message arrived like a slap: "stay away from eddie." No punctuation, no signature, just a warning that confirmed Sarah's worst fears. Someone was watching her, someone who knew about her obsession with a man who might not even be who he claimed to be. The paranoia that had been building for weeks crystallized into something approaching terror. Sarah began receiving silent phone calls in the middle of the night—calls that lasted just long enough for her to hear breathing before the line went dead. When she threatened to contact police, the calls stopped immediately, as if someone had been listening, waiting for exactly that response. The timing felt deliberate, calculated, designed to keep her off-balance without quite crossing into actionable harassment.

Chapter 5: Chapter 5: When Past and Present Converge

Sarah's return to Los Angeles should have brought relief, but instead it amplified her disconnection from the life she'd built. Her friend Jenni, struggling through failed IVF treatments, had postponed her own grief to welcome Sarah home with cake and sympathy. The gesture was typical of Jenni's generous heart, but it only made Sarah feel more selfish for being consumed by a man she'd known for seven days while her friend faced the end of her dreams of motherhood. The charity work that had once given Sarah purpose now felt hollow. During a pitch to a hospice company in Fresno, she encountered Ruth, one of their first patients—a girl they'd watched grow from a sick baby into a fierce teenager who was now dying in the place where Sarah was trying to sell their services. Ruth's deterioration was a stark reminder of what truly mattered, yet Sarah couldn't shake her obsession with Eddie's silence. Reuben, her ex-husband, had found love with Kaia, a yoga teacher whose calm presence made Sarah feel even more chaotic by comparison. Watching them together should have brought closure, but instead it highlighted how different Sarah's connection with Eddie had been. With Reuben, love had been built on mutual need and shared purpose. With Eddie, it had been something more primal, more inevitable—the recognition of a missing piece clicking into place. The sightings began in LA: Eddie's face in a taxi stuck in traffic, Eddie's voice asking for her at the office reception while she was away. Jenni confirmed the office visit, describing a man with an English accent who matched Eddie's appearance perfectly. But why would he come to Los Angeles? Why seek her out only to leave without explanation? The questions multiplied like cancer cells, each one spawning new possibilities, new fears. At her old school, where she'd reluctantly accompanied Tommy to launch his sports program, Sarah spotted a figure watching her from across the playing field. Slim, androgynous, wearing a khaki coat with the hood pulled up despite the warm weather. When she tried to get a better look, the person melted away, but not before turning back once to confirm they'd been observing her specifically. The encounter left her shaken, adding another layer to the growing sense that her past was catching up with her in ways she couldn't understand.

Chapter 6: Chapter 6: The Revelation That Changes Everything

The final revelation came through Kaia's tears in their office meeting room. The composed yoga teacher crumbled when Sarah asked about the story she'd told of watching their Clowndoctors work with a sick child. "Was he your son?" Sarah asked, and Kaia's face collapsed like a tent with its poles removed. The boy who'd turned away from their performers, who'd eventually been won over by their patient persistence—he'd been Kaia's child, lost to illness, the trauma that had driven her from journalism into healing work. The moment crystallized everything Sarah had been feeling about authenticity and performance, about the stories people told to make themselves bearable to others. Kaia had been drawn to Reuben not just for love, but because he represented connection to the people who'd brought joy to her dying son. Sarah's charity work, her careful distance from the children they served, her inability to have children of her own—it all stemmed from the same source: the terror of loss, the knowledge that everything precious could be stolen in an instant. As Sarah sat in Jenni's spare room, fighting nausea and exhaustion, the pieces began forming a pattern she didn't want to see. Eddie's appearance on the anniversary of Hannah's death. His knowledge of the local area, his careful questions about her past. The way he'd canceled phone calls that first day, as if he'd been expecting someone else to ring. The football team's cryptic warnings about not wanting to find him. The anonymous threats, the silent phone calls, the hooded figure watching from across the school field. The man who'd killed Hannah had never been named in the papers Sarah had read. She'd fled to America before the trial, unable to face the details of her sister's death. But someone knew who she was, knew where to find her, knew exactly how to approach her in the place where she was most vulnerable. The sheep on the village green, the easy laughter, the seven perfect days—what if it had all been calculated? Tommy's casual Facebook post became the key that unlocked everything: "Welcome home, Harrington!" Her maiden name, the name she'd abandoned nineteen years ago along with everything else from her old life. Sarah's hands shook as she typed her final message to Eddie, the words forming themselves with terrible clarity. The response came within hours. Eddie's voice on the phone was hollow, defeated. They agreed to meet at Santa Monica Beach, both of them knowing this conversation would destroy whatever fragile hope remained between them.

Chapter 7: Chapter 7: Confronting the Unforgivable Past

Under the California sun, with the Pacific crashing endlessly beside them, Sarah told Eddie the story she'd spent two decades trying to forget. She was seventeen, driving her twelve-year-old sister Hannah to meet friends in town. The accident happened on a bend in the Cirencester Road—not the version she'd been telling herself for nineteen years, but the truth that had been eating her alive from the inside. Hannah had been in the passenger seat when the other car appeared, driving too fast on the wrong side of the road. Sarah had swerved to avoid the collision, her Ford hitting a tree, the passenger side taking the full impact. Hannah had died instantly, her small body crushed by metal and physics and the split-second decision that had saved the other driver's life at the cost of her sister's. The man in the other car had fled the scene, escaping through fields and footpaths while Sarah sat trapped in twisted metal, calling Hannah's name. For weeks, police had searched for him. When they finally arrested Eddie David—eighteen years old, drunk, driving without a license—Sarah was already gone, fled to Los Angeles where Tommy's family had offered refuge. She'd never learned his name, never seen his face, never confronted the person whose reckless driving had stolen her sister's future. "You killed my sister," Eddie said, his voice barely audible above the sound of the waves. But his words were wrong, backwards, impossible. Sarah stared at him in confusion until the truth hit her like a physical blow. Eddie hadn't been the driver. He'd been the passenger in Hannah's car, Hannah's secret boyfriend, the boy she'd been sneaking out to meet. The boy who'd survived the crash that killed the girl he loved. The kiss came without warning—desperate, heartbroken, final. Eddie pressed his mouth to Sarah's as if trying to memorize the taste of her, his arms pulling her close one last time before he walked away forever. Sarah watched him disappear into the crowd on Santa Monica pier, her hand instinctively moving to her stomach where cells were already dividing, creating life from their impossible love. For nineteen years, they'd each been carrying half the truth, each believing themselves responsible for Hannah's death. Sarah thought she'd killed her sister by swerving. Eddie thought he'd killed her by asking her to sneak out that night. The accident had been nobody's fault and everybody's fault, a collision of teenage recklessness and cosmic bad timing that had destroyed three lives in the space of a heartbeat.

Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Finding Redemption in Impossible Love

The pregnancy test confirmed what Sarah's body had been trying to tell her for weeks. Nine weeks along, the doctor said, dating back to those perfect June days in Eddie's barn. Sarah sat in the clinic bathroom, staring at the positive result, feeling the universe rearrange itself around this tiny, growing secret. She couldn't tell anyone—not Jenni, whose own fertility struggles had finally ended in devastating failure, not her parents, who'd spent nineteen years grieving their fractured family, and certainly not Eddie, who'd made it clear that any future between them was impossible. The phone call came as she sat in a Malibu restaurant, picking at seafood she suddenly couldn't stomach. Hannah's voice—not her sister, but Hannah's mother, Carole Wallace—crackling across the international connection with news that changed everything. Eddie's mother had been watching, waiting, orchestrating events from the shadows for months. She'd known about Sarah, had even stalked and threatened her, but she'd kept the pregnancy secret until maternal instinct finally overcame nineteen years of hatred. Eddie discovered the truth on his mother's sixty-seventh birthday, sitting in a Stroud café when Sarah's parents rushed past their table, faces tight with worry. The drive to Gloucester Royal Hospital passed in a blur of terror and hope, his hands shaking on the steering wheel as he imagined every possible disaster that could befall the woman he loved and the child he'd never known existed. The waiting room became purgatory. Hours stretched like years as Eddie paced the corridors, his mind cycling through every conversation he'd had with Sarah, every moment they'd shared, every reason he'd convinced himself they couldn't be together. When the midwife found him at four in the morning, slumped in a plastic chair, hollow-eyed with exhaustion and fear, her words rewrote his entire world: "It's a boy. Sarah gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. She asked me to tell you—she knew you were here." Eddie collapsed forward, sobbing with relief and wonder and a joy so pure it felt like drowning in sunlight. His son. Their son. Born from love and loss and the impossible mathematics of human connection. Sarah's first text message arrived as dawn broke over the hospital car park: "He's beautiful. He's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. He looks like you. Please come and meet our boy tomorrow. I love you too." One year later, they gathered on Broad Ride for Alex's naming ceremony—not a christening, since neither parent believed in God, but a celebration of new life in the place where so much life had been lost. Eddie held his son against his chest, marveling at the perfect weight of him, the way Alex's tiny fingers curled around his thumb with absolute trust. Sarah watched them both with eyes that held wonder instead of shadows, her face transformed by the kind of happiness she'd never thought she deserved.

Summary

Sarah Mackey's story proves that some coincidences are too perfect to be accidents, too devastating to survive, and too powerful to destroy. Her seven days with Eddie David had felt like coming home, like finding the missing piece of herself she'd lost when Hannah died. But love built on buried truths is a house of cards, and Sarah's desperate search for answers had revealed cracks in the foundation she'd tried not to see. The man who'd vanished without explanation wasn't a stranger at all, but the other half of a tragedy that had been waiting nineteen years to complete itself. In the end, the accident that tore their worlds apart also brought them together. Hannah's death had created the circumstances that drove Sarah to America, that shaped Eddie into the man who could love her, that taught them both the precious fragility of human connection. Their son carries Hannah's memory in his name and his parents' eyes, a living bridge between past and future, proof that love can bloom in the darkest soil and light can emerge from the deepest shadows. Sometimes the very thing that breaks us also makes us whole, and sometimes the ghosts we've been running from are the only ones who can teach us how to live.

About Author

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J.M. Darhower

Darhower delves into the intricate dynamics of human relationships through her emotionally charged narratives, focusing on themes of love and psychological complexity. Her stories delve into the transformative power of love, portrayed as both beautiful and chaotic, striking with an intensity that challenges characters’ emotional fortitude. Her novels often explore mature themes and deep character psychology, as exemplified in works like "Ghosted," where emotional depth is at the forefront of the narrative.\n\nThrough her body of work, Darhower attracts readers who seek narratives rich in emotional nuance and complexity. Her books, such as the "Monster in His Eyes" trilogy, offer profound insights into the dark and often messy nature of relationships, creating a compelling experience for fans of romance and contemporary fiction. Her ability to capture the volatile nature of human connection has led to a significant following, evidenced by extensive ratings and reviews on Goodreads. This engagement reflects her success in resonating with an audience that values the intersection of romance and introspection.\n\nBy focusing on themes of intense emotional connection and psychological depth, Darhower’s writing offers readers an exploration of love that is both transformative and illuminating. Her novels, such as "Sempre" and "Menace," invite readers into a world where complex character dynamics drive the narrative forward, offering a rich tapestry of human experience. This approach not only enhances the reading experience but also solidifies her place within contemporary fiction, appealing to those who appreciate stories that challenge and engage on a deeply emotional level.

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